CET Taiwan

Language Learning Chinese
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Curious about whether anyone here has experience with the CET Taiwan exchange program.

One of my kids is considering it, but we have to pay the regular fees for the home university, which are quite high, and most of the credits would not count toward graduation. The program provides 12 credits of Chinese coursework and 3 elective, which will probably be an internship.
If any one you have experience with this program, I would appreciate your thoughts.

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I’ve never heard of it, but there are a few red flags for me:

  1. Taiwan’s universities have gotten in trouble a number of times for having “internships” that’s really straight up labor exploitation. I personally know Taiwanese people who have worked as salespeople at malls as part of their “internship”, for about half the salary they would have been paid to do the exact job if they’d applied to work there directly, with hours mandatory for graduation. Baristas at Starbucks as well. Far worse has happened to students from SEA. It looks like people who are in this program would be paying to work.
  2. A “30 minute” commute to NTU is insane if you don’t have control over the location. That could be in Taoyuan or Hsinchu and “technically” 30 minutes but actually more like an hour.
  3. I just realized that it’s almost 20k in USD, not NTD. ICLP is considered to be “the best place to learn Chinese”, and it’s also considered to be insanely overpriced at 170k NTD/semester (~5,000USD + housing, with a private room and bathroom in a shared apartment just off NTU’s campus as their priciest option at ~US$3,000).
  4. NTU’s Chinese classes let you audit normal classes at NTU and costs a fraction of ICLP’s costs. You would need to figure out your own housing it seems though. But at this price difference, housing in a five star hotel for a semester would still be cheaper than the CET program.
  5. The only advantage I see in the program you have listed is that it appears there’s lots of staff from outside Taiwan. Assuming they’re fluent in Chinese and good at navigating situations in Taiwan (like shitty landlords), this could be nice for someone coming to Taiwan for the first time. At the price you’re paying for tuition, however, you could hire a concierge service to do that stuff for you.
  6. I would never want a Taiwanese roommate that I don’t already know and haven’t vetted myself. So much opportunity for culture clash in ways that I consider to be “lacks common sense” (like leaving raw meat out unrefrigerated over night or putting cooked food in a pot on the floor, playing music from phone at full blast in the middle of the night, etc.) I’m not saying all Taiwanese are like this, but I’ve lived here long enough to know that there’s enough of a gap between how the average westerner lives and how the average Taiwanese person lives to know that it would be rough trying to navigate co-habitation when dealing with the rest of living in a totally new country.

TLDR: looks like a way too expensive program for anyone with common sense about Taiwan to attend.

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Thanks for the feedback! All valid concerns.

My understanding is that CET has been around a while, though they used to do most of their Mandarin programs in China, before the pandemic. They have a selection of companies they work with for internships, and students are able to choose the sector they prefer. Good point about roommates. They are supposed to be NTU students, but I don’t know the vetting process. One of their talking points is that living with a Taiwanese roommate will have more exposure to Mandarin. Yeah, 30 minutes is not a great commute, and could definitely get a better deal living on your own, closer to NTU.

Lots to think about.

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Probably advertised to the Taiwanese student as a good opportunity to practice English.

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I’ve lived long enough to know that just because a program or company has been around for a while doesn’t mean they’re any good at what they do. Especially if they team up with US universities (transcript from the University of Minnesota in this case), a school can basically force students to attend their program (as the only one that a university will guarantee to accept credit from.) My university did this. There was only one program that would be accepted for study abroad in China and it was pretty bad from a stress/destroy your gpa automatically standpoint. (people who had done that program and ICLP said ICLP was super easy in comparison. One’s brain literally can’t handle that kind of cramming). The Chinese department at my university was really pissed at me for coming back from China and telling the other Chinese majors below me that it’s not worth it. They all went and signed up for middlebury’s program in China because they had enough credits that a semester of credit-less study abroad didn’t matter to them. Lost face and probably lost kickbacks for the people who made the arrangement to try to force people into the program I convinced a bunch of people to skip on. But the program I did in China appears to be great if you only look at their website and the number of years they’ve been around (over 30).

I would recommend reaching out directly to people who have done the program in Taiwan and asking them to give all the deets. By this I mean private messaging people who tagged the program on their public or semi public social media accounts, not getting alumni contact info from the program itself.

But I will again emphasize that this program is almost three times more expensive than the most overpriced Chinese program in Taiwan. Assuming they’re just going to NTU’s CLC and then having some “internships”, Tuition for a semester at CLC is 42k NTD (~1,300USD). So even factoring in housing, you’re paying more than 10x more to have maybe in country support.

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