‘Those who can, educate’: the academic ability of college students in education programs in Taiwan

Abstract

Recruiting high-caliber individuals into education programs in higher education institutions to train them to be tomorrow’s educators/teachers has been a perennial challenge. Students in education programs are found to be in general lower in academic standing than their counterparts in other fields, reflecting a seemingly distressing phenomenon of ‘those who cannot, educate’. In contrast to such a discouraging phenomenon, this article shows that in Taiwan, based on a nationally representative data set of 12,246 college students, students in education programs are academically more outstanding than their non-education counterparts. Furthermore, among education majors, those who aspire to be future teachers have even higher academic quality than their non-teaching counterparts. The underlying policy and socio-cultural contexts of such a positive phenomenon of ‘those who can, educate’ are further explained and implications for educators in other countries are discussed.

Keywords:

• academic quality
• college students
• education programs
• teacher education
• Taiwan

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the National Science Council, Taiwan, the Republic of China, for funding this research, and would also like to thank the Integrated Higher Education Database System in Taiwan for permission to use their nationally representative datasets for analysis.