2005
Spring American Education Fair
- Taiwan Post-Fair Report
AIEF is pleased to report that there were enthusiastic turnouts at each of the 2005 Spring American Education Fair’s three venues in the cities of Taipei, Kaohsiung, and Taichung. Featured in this post-Fair report is a summary of the events that took place before and during the 2005 Spring American Education Fair in Taiwan, including information about AIEF’s pre-Fair promotional activities, teacher training workshop, feedback from fair participants, news about our student tracking system, our student interpreter service, an update on Taiwan’s recruitment market, attendance statistics, American Institute In Taiwan (AIT) briefings, Spring Fair highlights, AIEF scholarships, and the schedule for AIEF’s 2005 Summer American Education Fair in Beijing and Fall Fairs in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore.
Subjects covered in this
report:
Pre-Fair Activities
Prior to the Fair, selected representatives of American schools were interviewed on ICRT, the local English-language radio station in Taipei, while others participated in an AIT chat room session with students. Together with extensive newspaper and television coverage, these pre-Fair promotional activities helped to generate positive publicity in advance for the American Education Fairs.
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Teacher Training Workshop
On March 18-19, AIEF’s Second Annual American Language Teachers’ Training Workshop for Taiwan’s English language teachers was held at the Howard Plaza Hotel in conjunction with the American Education Fair. With a focus on English as it is used in American educational and social environments, the free two-day workshop provided practical training exercises for Taiwan’s English teachers who instruct at the elementary school level or the middle school and above level. At the invitation of AIEF, experts from several well-known American universities traveled to Taiwan to lead the workshops. Workshop presenters included Dr. Barbara Hawkins (Teachers College, Columbia University), Dr. Alexandra Rowe (University of South Carolina), Professor Kathy Trump (George Mason University), and Professor Deanna Wormuth (Georgetown University).
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Fair Participant Feedback
AIEF is grateful for the comments and suggestions that we received from fair participants who completed the post-Fair survey. Your advice helps us to continue to improve our services. Many fair participants expressed their positive impressions of the Fair’s professional organization, interpreter services, and promotional efforts, as well as the quality of the students who visited their booths.
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Student Tracking System Facilitates Recruiting Efforts
AIEF pioneered its online student tracking database in 2001, and has offered the database as a service exclusively to U.S. schools since 2002. AIEF’s emphasis on service, quality, and integrity explains why its current database, the largest of its kind in Taiwan, has maintained a database of over 90,000 current and active students. Each student participating in the fair is given an identification number so that schools can submit a log of your school’s visitors to AIEF at the end of the fair(s). Upon receiving the log of your visitors, AIEF will send you the detailed student information, which includes contact details and educational goals. This list will be sent to you shortly.
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Student Interpreter Service
We are delighted to note that, once again, the majority of student interpreters who assisted the American school representatives at the fair have received rave reviews. AIEF provides interpretation service at no extra cost to fair participants. Enrolled at local institutions, the student interpreters not only help to translate and disseminate information at the fair, but potentially could also serve as ambassadors to their own institutions on behalf of U.S. schools.
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Taiwan Market Update
With 26,178 students enrolled at American education institutions, Taiwan is currently the sixth leading source of international students in the U.S.. The 2003/2004 academic year saw a 6.6 percent decline in the total number of students from Taiwan studying in the USA compared to the previous year, according to IIE’s “Open Doors” report. Despite this downturn, encouraging statistics published by the Ministry of Education show a 36.1 percent increase in the number of students from Taiwan who obtained visas to study in the USA in 2004 versus 2003; the MOE reported an increase from 10,324 students in 2003 to 14,054 students in 2004. The percentage of students from Taiwan studying in the United States at the graduate level is 57.4 percent, while 32.5 percent are enrolled at the undergraduate level, and 10.2 percent are in language and other non-degree programs.
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Recruitment Competition From UK And Other Countries
In contrast with the 1980s, when the United States attracted over 80 percent of Taiwan’s students who studied abroad, the current market share for the United States has fallen to around 40 percent. It is expected that competition from the UK and other countries will continue to be keen in Taiwan’s recruitment market in the foreseeable future.
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2005 Taiwan Spring American Education Fair Statistics
Commencing at the Howard Plaza Hotel in Taipei, the three-city 2005 Spring American Education Fair in Taiwan ran from March 19-22. The two-day event in Taipei was held from 1:00-6:00 PM on Saturday, March 19 and from 11:00 AM – 4:00 PM on Sunday, March 20th. In Kaohsiung, the exhibition took place at the Grand Hi Lai Hotel from 4:00-9:00 PM on Monday, March 21st. The last stop of the three-city exhibition was Taichung, where the fair was held on Tuesday, March 22nd, from 4:00 – 9:00 PM at the Evergreen Laurel Hotel. The US-Taiwan Business Council is an honorary sponsor of these events, which were open to the public free of charge. Attendance estimates for the three Fair venues were 4,432 visitors for Taipei, 664 for Kaohsiung, and 756 for Taichung for a total of 5,842 total students.
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AIT Briefings at the Fairs
At AIEF’s pre-Fair orientation held on March 19th at the Howard Plaza Hotel, Consular Officer Alexander Yuan of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) provided an overview of the student visa application process in Taiwan and the latest student visa statistics to the education delegation. He also conducted student visa seminars at the Taipei venue on Sunday, March 21st, and in Taichung on March 22nd. Mr. William Johnson of AIT-Kaohsiung spoke to students and answered their questions about student visas at the Kaohsiung fair venue on Monday, March 21st.
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Spring Fair Highlights
Free advising for students was available at AIEF’s booth at each of the fair venues. Students were encouraged to register their contact information and academic preferences in AIEF’s student tracking system in order to receive individualized materials from U.S. educational institutions. For the benefit of students and parents, a series of free symposia on educational topics and visa issues, as well as individual school presentations, were held at all three venues of the Fair. On behalf of ETS, AIEF distributed materials on the next generation TOEFL exam to fairgoers.
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AIEF Scholarships
On an annual basis, AIEF 's Scholarship Committee awards a limited number of scholarships to qualified students from Taiwan who have been accepted by accredited American educational institutions. The scholarship application deadline was April 1st, 2005, for students enrolling at an accredited U.S. community college, four-year college, university, or graduate program during the fall term of 2005. Application materials were available at each of the American Education Fair venues.
AIEF is honored to have been chosen to administer a new scholarship program on behalf of ETTV for graduate studies at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communications. Created to encourage promising students from Taiwan to follow a career path in mass communications, the purpose of the ETTV Scholarship Program is to help to cultivate future professionals who will be able to use their expertise gained at USC to develop quality programming for Asian, American, and international communities. Scholarship support from ETTV, one of Taiwan’s fastest-growing television networks, is US $100,000 per year.
This year, AIEF revised its scholarship program to benefit and encourage more undergraduate students from Taiwan to study at U.S. educational institutions. AIEF announced that it will award scholarships in the amount of NT$2,000 to each of the first 50 undergraduate students from Taiwan who provide substantiated proof of their enrollment at a U.S. college or university in the fall of 2005. For graduate students, the application process remained the same as in previous years. Graduate school scholarship applicants are first screened by AIEF, while the final recipients are later selected by a scholarship committee comprised of members representing the academic, government, and business sectors.
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2005 Summer and Fall Fair Dates
Registration is now open for AIEF’s 2005 Summer American Education Fair in Beijing, as well as for its Fall Fairs in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. The 2005 Summer and Fall Fair schedules are as follows:
Beijing - July 9-11
Seoul - September 24-25
Busan - September 27 (In cooperation with Korea Trade Fairs)
Taipei - October 1-2
Kaohsiung - October 3
Taichung - October 4
Singapore – October 7 (In cooperation with USEIC)
Online registration is available at:
http://www.aief-usa.org/services/signup_fair.htm. For more information, please visit our Website or call the AIEF office in California at 626-965-1995
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