Education authorities plan to cut enrollment at universities and graduate institutes by about 35 percent over the next decade due to a shrinking population caused by a low birth rate.
Enrollment targets in undergraduate and doctoral programs are looking at 40 percent cuts, the Ministry of Education said at a recent conference of university presidents.
The nation only saw 1.06 births per woman in 2013 and experts say a rate of 2.1 births per woman is necessary to prevent the population from shrinking.
Ministry of Education Department of Higher Education director Huang Wen-ling (黃雯玲) said that she expects enrollment numbers to begin falling sharply next year.
Enrollment in the year 2023 could be 310,000 people fewer than the figures recorded in 2013, Huang said, adding that that would mean a NT$30 billion (US$953.41 million) reduction in tuition revenues.
In addition, teaching staff employed by higher education institutes are expected to decrease by 10,000 by 2023, Huang said.
Enrollment could plummet to 233,093 in 2023, a drop of 35.84 percent from 363,324 in 2013.
The number of bachelors degree students is expected to fall to 182,293 by 2023, a 39.6 percent drop from 301,820 in 2013.
Enrollment numbers for master’s degree programs are forecast to drop to 46,000, a 14.55 percent decrease from 53,834 in 2013, and for doctoral degrees the number is expected to decline to 4,800, down 37.4 percent from 7,670 in 2013.
Master’s students are expected to take up a higher relative proportion of higher education students in 10 years, while the proportion of bachelor’s and doctoral degree students are forecast to drop.
Bachelor’s degree students are set to make up 78 percent of all tertiary students, compared with 83.07 percent last year, while masters students could rise to 20 percent from 14.82 percent last year and doctoral degree student numbers are likely to account for 2 percent, down from 2.11 percent last year.
Huang said the Ministry of Education would seek to bolster the quality of higher education curricula by improving the teacher-to-student ratio from the current 32:1 for undergraduate programs and 12:1 for graduate programs, to 27:1 and 10:1 respectively.
National Taiwan University President Yang Pan-chyr (楊泮池) said that different guidelines should be set for different academic disciplines depending on societal needs.
For example, the enrollment targets for medical, accounting and other certifiable professions should not be reduced, he said.
He said the government should allow schools to carry out enrollment reductions at their own discretion and advised graduate degree holders to stay in academia, in addition to seeking careers in private industries.
Chinese Culture University President Lee Tien-rein (李天任) said that enrollment reductions and department closures might have a profound impact on the nation’s talent pool.
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