The Ministry of Education has been making preparations to help universities, and particularly private universities, to exit the education market if they continue to fail to recruit enough students, Minister of Education Wu Ching-chi (吳清基) said yesterday.
Speaking at the legislature, Wu said the ministry has made the preparations because an exit mechanism was necessary because enrollment at privately run colleges and universities continues to decline.
A recent ministry report showed that enrollments at privately run higher education institutions have continued to decline over the past two years, with the number of students falling short of the 6,802 target this academic year.
By 2012, privately run higher education institutions would have suffer a total enrollment shortfall of 71,000 if the shortfall increases by a rate of 2 percent annually, the report said.
In the worst-case scenario, the report said, the ministry would regulate the transfer of students and faculty layoffs and financially assist those institutions that were forced to close.
The ministry unveiled a package of regulations in June to pave the way for universities that failed ministry evaluations or were unable to recruit enough students to gradually exit the education market.
Under the new regulations, universities that fail to recruit up to 70 percent of their officially approved student numbers for three consecutive years would have their annual quotas cut by between 10 percent and 30 percent.
That means no universities would see their student quotas cut until the 2011 academic year, regulations that critics say are holding back reform.
Twenty-four of the 162 universities and technology institutes in Taiwan — all privately run — saw their freshmen registration rates fall short of the 70 percent target in the 2008 academic year, with one of them having a registration rate of just 11.62 percent.
In related news, a record number of exchange students from China are attending Kaohsiung’s I-Shou University this semester, securing the school’s leading status among universities pursuing cross-strait academic exchanges.
In a press release, the university, which has the most Chinese exchange students in the nation, said the number of students had reached 200, compared with 169 last year.
Taiwan allows Chinese students to stay for up to a year for short-term research.
University president Fu Shen-li (傅勝利) said the school continued to aggressively pursue academic exchanges with China because “such exchanges had a very positive effect on both local students and Chinese exchange students in terms of their education.”
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY FLORA WANG
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