With blue sky season gone in Taiwan, I was looking at this picture I took a month ago while waiting for a friend. It's of the blue sky (and a part of my finger) above the entrance to Taiwan's number one university. But that ranking depends on how you rank schools.
Taiwan has a unique way of ranking both high schools and universities. That is it doesn't rank them on how good the schools are, rather it ranks them on how good the students are. Allow me to explain...
Basically to get into college all students must take an exam and how they do on this exam determines what schools they can get into. If you
score at the very top you can get into school A, a little below that you can get into school B, below that is school C, etc. So Taiwan sets a ranking of the schools and the higher you get the "better" the school you can go to.
However the flaw with this system is that school A isn't necessarily the best school in the country, it is just considered that because they can only allow the best students. This is where rankings by international lists come in. These take into account school quality, facilities, teachers, and many other aspects so you get a more rounded view of the schools. On these lists you will find that schools which are easier to get, thus "worse" in Taiwan's view, are actually much better than the schools that require a higher test score to get into.
However it doesn't really matter the actual quality of a school, in Taiwan the only thing that matters is that you were a better student so you got into a better school. Taiwanese businesses don't care about the quality of your education, rather they care about how well you did in school. For this reason even though the number 10 school might be the best medical school in the country, if you want to be a doctor you will go to a higher ranked school even if they have a much worse premed
program. Not only that, if you get into the better schools but they don't have the major you want, than too bad, you will be forced to make the choice to go to the best school possible and just choose another major. In Taiwan it's a more guaranteed success if you went to the number 1 school and studied their worst major, than if you went to the
number 8 school and studied in the best department in that major in the country.
Anyway more to come about this school and a few others in the future. I actually had it all as one long post, but hey, a year is a long time!
