Ho Chou-fei (何卓飛), the head of the Ministry of Education’s (MOE) Department of Higher Education yesterday urged universities that failed to recruit as many students as they hoped this year to establish crisis management task forces.
He urged them to reorganize their administrative structures and draw up plans for survival.
“If the situation worsens, some schools may not be able to recruit any students in three or four years,” he said.
Ho’s call came after statistics released by the Undergraduate Admissions Commission yesterday showed that there remained a total of 4,788 vacancies in 105 academic departments after the admissions of all college entrance examinees were finalized.
The number of vacancies left unfilled this year was about nine times that of last year.
Several universities even failed to fill a majority of their vacancies.
For instance, Toko University in Chiayi was only able to enrol 201 students or less than 10 percent of available vacancies in its 18 academic departments. Twelve of the 18 departments recruited less than 10 students.
Tainan’s Hsing Kuo University of Management only managed to fill around 25 percent of its available vacancies with around 1,200 vacancies remaining.
Commission director Kuo Kun-huang told a press conference yesterday morning that the number of unfilled vacancies is expected to increase annually because the number of high school graduates has been decreasing.
Toko University and the Hsing Kuo University defended their poor recruitment performances.
Toko University secretary-general Fang Cheng-chih (方政治) blamed the declining birth rate, saying the school would focus on recruiting transfer students.
He said it would deliver all of its courses no matter how many students attend the school when the new semester begins next month.
Ku Chung-ming (辜仲明), special assistant to the president of Hsing Kuo University of Management, said recruitment performance was not the school’s main concern.
“[The school’s] reputation is more important than the [recruitmant] performance,” he said.
According to statistics from the commission, the college admission rate this year hit a new high of 97.1 percent, with the lowest admission score being 7.69 points at the Department of Health and Environment of Leader University in Tainan.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching