A 10-year-old college in the south has become the first school to close under the twin burdens of low enrolment and heavy debt.
Kao Fong College of Digital Content in Pingtung County announced on its Web site on Thursday that it will close next month after helping its more than 600 students transfer to other schools in the area.
The school owes its faculty members and creditors NT$300 million (US$9.9 million). The Ministry of Education last month ordered to school to shut down unless it could submit a viable plan to improve its financial situation.
Kao Fong College acting president Hsieh Chieh-huang (謝捷晃) said the school board reached the decision earlier this month to cut further losses after it failed to find a company that is willing to take over the management of the school.
The college is built on land rented from the state-owned Taiwan Sugar Corp and will now be returned to the company, Hsieh said.
About 70 members of the school’s teachers and other staff have not received their full salaries since May last year.
Kao Fong is one of at least two dozen schools on the ministry’s watch list considered to be in danger of having to shut down.
Several other colleges could follow in its footsteps, as school enrolment drops because of an aging population.
The nation’s low fertility rate — which has remained below 2 since at least the mid-1980s — poses a serious challenge to colleges and high schools — mostly private ones — as many struggle to find enough students to fill their classrooms.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods