One of the core issues of higher education in Taiwan is the government’s differential resource allocation to the social and humanistic fields in contrast to the science and technology fields in universities. According to the recent 5-year financial statistics from at least 10 national universities (mostly belonging to the top universities in Taiwan), those which with higher proportion of humanities and social science divisions received less financial investment and fewer teacher position offers from the government than those which with higher proportion of natural science and technology divisions. Therefore, the so-called “science-technology type” universities obtained better student-teacher ratio and higher financial support per student than the “socio-humanity type” universities did. For example, the National Yang-ming University, in which 90% divisions are related with medical and nursing fields, got one teacher for about 11 students. In contrast, the National Chengchi University, in which 90% divisions are related with social science and humanity fields, get one teacher for about 22 students. Government funding per students in Yang-Ming University is also nearly twice about it in Chengchi University. The above phenomena may be viewed as a “double unequal treatment”. However, the cause of these phenomena is historical, incidental, and mysterious. More than ten years ago, during an era of striving for economic growth, the government made a policy to provide one additional faculty position for natural science and engineering fields which recruited 6 additional graduate students. Later, the National Conference on Science and Technology also made a decision to offer 100 faculty positions related with science and engineering for nationwide universities to compete. On the other hand, government’s regular annual funding for each university is based on a mathematical formula which assumes that science and technology fields need more Laboratory equipment and therefore higher budget. This formula never changes except some small fine-tuning based on the number of students of previous years. These policies became a tradition resistant to change. The current paper is going to demonstrate some related data and to reflect on the policies for a better transition.

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