After this year’s university entrance exams, there was a shortfall of almost 300 students for places in 11 universities. This might not seem much, but with the falling birthrate, this figure will only climb. Some predict a shortfall of 70,000 by 2021, which would leave almost 60 universities with a student recruitment crisis within 10 years.
Following the Kao Fong College of Digital Contents’ closure, the Yung Ta Institute of Technology and Commerce recently announced plans to shut down, making it the second institute of higher education to pull out of the market recently. Given the prevailing trend, it is by no means alarmist to warn that worse is yet to come.
Whether Minister of Education Wu Se-hwa (吳思華) oversees a drastic restructuring of the system has significant implications for the future of higher education and for young people. Since accepting more Chinese or other overseas students is unlikely to save the day, encouraging public universities to merge and private institutions to either reinvent themselves or withdraw from the market seems to be the most viable option to avoid a wholesale collapse of the university system.
According to a Control Yuan survey, only a quarter of the more than 50 public universities and technical colleges operate optimally, and as many as 63 percent have below-par student numbers. This means that mergers between public universities are inevitable.
The Ministry of Education is reportedly targeting candidates for mergers in cities or counties where there are two or more public universities or a single university with a student population of less than 10,000.
To date, there have been only three successful mergers: National Dong Hwa University, which acquired National Hualien University of Education, and mergers to form National Taichung University of Science and Technology, and National Chiayi University.
This rather modest record is sufficient to demonstrate how difficult it is to bring together institutions with different styles and traditions.
For private universities that have lagged behind in operating efficiency, failed to attract students, performed poorly in evaluations and exhausted their funding, as well as being saddled with financial problems and offering the position of school president to the highest bidder, there is only one way forward: get out of the game.
Although the ministry instigated a mechanism last year for universities to close, how it is to establish an effective mechanism under current legislation while protecting students and teachers’ rights depends on how committed the minister is to implementing the mechanism.
Meanwhile, the ratio of universities to technical/vocational colleges is imbalanced, and this has all the markings of a crisis in the making.
Many lecturers at technical and vocational colleges admit that their students are flocking to careers in the tourism and leisure industry, while there is little interest in engineering and technology jobs. Manufacturing is offering salaries of NT$35,000, but there are few takers.
In China, technical college postgraduate students are having trouble finding jobs in which they can apply what they have learned. Policymakers there have embarked on major reforms, taking more than 600 universities and turning them into technical colleges to de-emphasize academic disciplines and encourage students to study vocational subjects.
Perhaps the ministry should consider changing universities that have not been performing well yet have potential, into technical or vocational colleges.
Lee Wo-chiang is a professor in the Department of Banking and Finance at Tamkang University.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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