In the recent past, more than 400,000 children were born in Taiwan per year, but there were only a few dozen universities. Children were under pressure to advance to higher levels of education due to a distorted value system that placed outsized importance on educational backgrounds. In response to these social expectations, the nation saw a large increase in the number of universities.
However, birthrates fell faster than anyone expected. In 1997, about 326,000 children were born, and these children reached university age last year. In 1998, the Year of the Tiger, the number of newborns fell sharply to 271,000, and this reduction of 55,000 is set to have an impact on the nation’s higher education institutions this year.
As these institutions absorb the impact of a falling birthrate, it is hoped that the Ministry of Education would come up with a response. Minister of Education Wu Se-hua (吳思華) last year said that the number of universities would drop to 100 within six years, suggesting that merging universities is the best way to address the problem.
However, Department of Higher Education Director Nicole Lee (李彥儀) said that the ministry would promote the merger of public universities while, at the same time, promising that such mergers would not lead to reductions in public expenditure, or the number of teachers or enrolled students — and that there would be additional subsidies.
University mergers are occurring around the world, but the goal of these mergers is the pursuit of excellence and the creation of top universities with both economic scope and competitive advantages.
The result of Taiwan’s falling birthrate is that there are not enough students to fill available places at universities, but the ministry’s approach of merging universities instead of reducing the number of student places available is unlikely to be effective.
The right approach would be to reduce the number of student places by having every university cut the number by 10 percent to 15 percent. The problem is that this could affect some students’ rights to education, and students that would have been eligible for public universities might be forced to attend private schools. As long as Taiwan continues its love affair with educational resumes, this approach is not feasible. In addition, reducing the number of student places is still only a response to the symptom rather than the cause.
Responding to the cause would mean embracing market competition, allowing schools to disappear and setting public and private school tuition fees at the same level. The result would be that the main reason for choosing a university would no longer be differences in tuition fees, but other considerations, such as the quality of the education on offer and personal interests.
This would allow private universities to compete with public schools. The government should heed the warning inherent in the circumstance that there are no students from poor families at top universities and that education is “hereditary” in the sense that students whose parents have attended university are more likely to attend university than students from families where no one has a received a university education.
The government should stop differentiating between public and private schools in its distribution of subsidies and instead invest in the education of children from disadvantaged families by offering more subsidies and educational channels to able children from disadvantaged families. This is the best option if social mobility is the goal of education.
Yang Chih-yuan is a project-appointed assistant professor in the Department of Civic Education and Leadership at National Taiwan Normal University.
Translated by Perry Svensson
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
Ursula K. le Guin in The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas proposed a thought experiment of a utopian city whose existence depended on one child held captive in a dungeon. When taken to extremes, Le Guin suggests, utilitarian logic violates some of our deepest moral intuitions. Even the greatest social goods — peace, harmony and prosperity — are not worth the sacrifice of an innocent person. Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), since leaving office, has lived an odyssey that has brought him to lows like Le Guin’s dungeon. From late 2008 to 2015 he was imprisoned, much of this
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and