The 2020 latest ranking of the Top-20 Universities of Excellence Performances was announced by the Cheers Magazine the other day. In this year, the presidents from 148 universities were invited to recommend the other schools that have great growths or progresses of school-running performances. According to the evaluation result, Asia University (AU) wins the No. 9 place among both the national and private universities in Taiwan, and was awarded together with the other Top-20 universities, including National Taiwan University, National Tsing Hua University, National Cheng Kung University, and National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. In addition, AU is also ranked No. 2 among the private non-medical universities. Founded for only 19 years in Taiwan, AU has been honored with numerous awards and remains to be ranked in the top 10 for the sixth consecutive year.

The Top-20 University Award Ceremony was held on February 25, 2020. Prof. Jeffrey J. P. Tsai, the President at AU, attended the award ceremony and received the award from Prof. Leeh-Ter Yao, the former Political Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Education. As pointed out by the Cheers Magazine and the other universities in the evaluation, one important reason why AU is named to be in the top-10 final list is that AU has evident performance strategies for AI education. “For example, AU established academic research centers, such as AI, big data, fin-tech and block-chain technology, to enhance the students’ research capabilities; and also created AI-related courses for the students to help increase their AI learning experiences,” said one of participants in the evaluation group.

As for the internationalization affair, the survey result shows that AU ranks the first in Taiwan in the aspect of ‘number of exchange students’. In recent years, AU has been doing a lot of efforts to provide high-quality academic and English-teaching courses to foreign students. The academic atmosphere and the leading professionalism in various fields successfully attracted up to 1,056 foreign students from the United States, Japan, Australia, Korea, Singapore, India, Indonesia, Thailand and other countries to study in AU. With the increasing of the number of international students studying at AU, it gives AU students the opportunity not only to develop relationships with their peers from all over the world, but also to cultivate cross-cultural knowledge as well as other social skills.

Furthermore, the survey result of the numbers of outbound exchange students shows that AU is ranked No. 3, next to National Taiwan University and Tamkang University. There are 576 students studying abroad, which is a 107.94% increase from the last year. They study at some of the most prestigious universities in the world, including Case Western Reserve University in the US, De Montfort University in the UK, Western Sydney University in Australia, Ca' Foscari University of Venice in Italy (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia), and Kindai University in Japan, showing that the number of AU students studying abroad is growing. Also, AU has been strongly promoting internationalization over the past decade. In each year, AU provides a variety of student exchange funds to AU students who want to study abroad. As pointed out by AU President Tsai, AU has received subsidies from the Study Overseas Program (‘學海計畫’) of the Ministry of Education. “In the future, the number of students to be sent will increase year by year,” said also President Tsai.