In the courtyard of the Chung Hsing private high school, desks and chairs are piled high like a monument or an unlit bonfire. Mounds of debris cover the play area, as two construction workers pull more broken furniture from empty classrooms, throwing them toward a pickup truck.
The Taipei private school closed in 2019 after failing to reverse financial problems caused by low enrolment, and was sold to developers. The school was an early victim of a problem now sweeping across Taiwan’s educational institutions: Decades of declining births mean there are no longer enough students to fill classrooms.
Like much of East Asia, Taiwan is struggling to achieve the “replacement rate” needed to maintain a stable population. That rate is 2.1 babies per woman, but Taiwan has not hit that number since the mid-1980s. Last year, the rate was 0.865.
Photo: CNA
Demographers and governments fear looming economic crises caused by a growing elderly population without enough working taxpayers to support them. In Taiwan, the impact of shrinking generations has already started affecting military recruitment, and now is flowing on to enrolments at schools and universities.
Between 2011 and 2021, the number of students in Taiwan’s primary and junior-high schools dropped from 2.3 million to below 1.8 million.
Mrs Lai lives in Taipei and has a 22-month-old child, but intends to stop there. “The cost of childcare is now high, in both time and money. It’s difficult to consider a second child without increasing salary levels and reducing working hours.”
“I focus on the quality of life for myself as well as my baby. Considering the current allocation of income and time, it would be difficult to maintain the satisfactory status quo if we had a second child,” she said.
Private schools, which are not as popular as public ones, are going first.
News reports show that dozens of private schools are facing closure, and a Taiwan government list of schools requiring “extraordinary assistance” includes 13 private and vocational high-schools that are at risk of shutting as early as next year.
The Ministry of Education said 15 colleges and universities have closed since 2014. Last week, it was revealed that four of Taiwan’s 103 private universities have been ordered to close, for the same reason as Chung Hsing high school.
Union of Private School Educators chairperson Wu Chun-chung (吳忠春) told local media that he expects another 40 to 50 private universities to close by 2028.
Taiwan Higher Education Union president Chou Ping (周平) said public universities are not facing imminent closure, but those in suburban areas, particularly of lower rank or those devoted more to humanities than Stem subjects, were at highest risk.
The government has tried various financial incentives and regulatory changes to encourage people to have more — or any — children. However, people continue to resist, citing the pressure of traditional gender roles falling unfairly on women, as well as rising costs of living and the difficulty of balancing careers. Salaries in Taiwan are relatively low, and city housing is expensive.
The parts of Taiwan with higher birthrates tend to be areas with lower costs of living that are still close to the capital, regions with generous local subsidies like the outlying islands, or places that have better employment opportunities and community services, like Hsinchu County.
Hsinchu is Taiwan’s richest county, thanks to its massive science parks built largely around the semiconductor industry. Its population has grown over the past five years, attracting young families.
Jiafeng elementary school director of academic affairs Fu Jie-lin said many junior-high schools in Zhubei are overcrowded, and parents are so nervous about securing a place that they are trying to pre-enrol their children while they are still newborns. Local media has reported predictions of a shortfall of 1,000 school enrolment places by 2027.
However, even Hsinchu’s baby boom appears to be slowing, with Fu reporting a “sharp drop” in enrolment numbers in the last two years. However, it is not necessarily a bad thing, he said. “The size of the school is the same, and with fewer students, the teaching environment of the school will become better and students will have more space.”
It is a sentiment shared by Chou. He says the flailing private tertiary institutions should be merged with public universities rather than sold to developers.
Taiwan underfunds universities compared with other OECD nations and has a far higher ratio of students to teachers, he added. “If we put more expenditure into public education we can help more low-income students, and the quality of education will be improved.”
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