Part 3 Hope Engineering and making figures(1999/06)

Mr. Meng visited me to buy a set of books back to USA for gifts to his Chinese friends. In the talk, I mentioned one of my idea and communicate to H. A. Simon two months ago that China's investment in higher education is far from adequate, and Free Simon University of design science on line is possible and worth pursuing now. H. A. Simon replied that how to link and share the resources of strong universities through new technologies is more important than establishing new ones.

Mr. Meng spent two years in China to promote economical thinking in K-12, and I told him that many Taiwanese are very keen on the Educational Hope Engineering Projects in China and contributed a lot. Mr. Meng thinks it is a shame for Chinese government to talk about the importance of science and technologies, only provide lip service but can not walk the talk. They spent too much in military system development.

One of the bottleneck of the supply of higher education is the artificial scarcity of capacity, in the name of quality control in Taiwan. In 1988, the gross participant rate of higher education( I hope some readers might like to tell me the exact terminology of this statistic) is 28.3%, due to educational system reformation demand from general public during last 5 years, the educational system went for "instant pudding" approaches: more private and public colleges, most important, upgrade many occupational and technical schools, hence now the rate has risen to 56.1%.( cf. USA is 81%, G. B. is 50 %, German is 44% and Japan is 40%.) What a magic work it was.

The hope of quality education is still quite remote from us. Take another mode of New University Establishment as an example, some companies are generous to set up its fund or foundation for it. But they neglect the existing employees' needs in training and education, as Deming's 14 points go. That is, the board of directors went for fame but forget some of his basic obligation.