University graduates comprised the largest group among Taiwan’s literate population last year, an indication of widening access to higher education in the country, a report released this week by the Ministry of the Interior said.
The report showed that at the end of last year, the number of Taiwanese citizens with tertiary education levels accounted for 35 percent of the population aged 15 and over.
Those with senior high school levels accounted for 32.92 percent, those with elementary school levels accounted for 15.23 percent and those with junior high school levels accounted for 14.31 percent.
The results mean that the number of people in that age group who have received higher education has risen by 18.5 percentage points compared with 10 years ago, when the ratio was 16.41 percent.
At the end of last year, Taiwan had 19.132 million citizens aged 15 and above, accounting for 83.05 percent of the country’s total population, the report said.
The literacy rate among this age group stood at 97.78 percent. This means that 2.22 in every 100 persons in the group were illiterate.
In terms of gender, the literacy rate for women was 3.4 percentage points lower than that for men, with the difference being especially obvious among those 65 and older.
In this age group, the literacy rate for women was 21.37 percentage points lower than that for men.
In the 15 to 44 age group, however, the literacy rate for women was comparable with the literacy rate for men.
The number of Taiwanese citizens with tertiary education totaled 6.679 million at the end of last year, up 4.24 percent from the previous year.
Of this number, 3.51 million, or 52.56 percent, were men, and 3.169 million, or 47.44 percent, were women.
Noticeably, more women than men had tertiary education in the below-40 age group, but the opposite was true among older people, mainly because of the prevalence of gender inequality in years gone by, the report said.
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