Recent allegations that former Hsinchu mayor Lin Chih-chien (林智堅) plagiarized his 2008 and 2017 master’s theses have exposed some strange phenomena in Taiwan’s graduate schools. If the Ministry of Education cannot tackle those problems, the institutions might turn into diploma mills, opening the back door for people of elevated importance. First, due to Taiwan’s low birthrate, graduate schools have been grappling with declining student enrollment. In the past few years, some of them have discontinued written entry tests or lowered the standards for applicants. Some master’s progr...