The Ministry of the Interior’s acquisition of a property last week under the now-closed Chung Chou University of Science and Technology marked the first such transfer to the government for alternative uses.
The property, including 60,745m2 of land and 12 buildings, was valued at NT$2.36 billion (US$74.48 million) and transferred to the ministry on Tuesday last week.
The property is likely to be used by the reservist forces and the Quick Response Forces under the Second Special Police Corps, it said.
Photo: Taipei Times
Ministry of Education’s Department of Technological and Vocational Education Deputy Director-General Ko Chin-wei (柯今尉) on Friday said that the board of the foundation that owns the building, eponymous with the school, had been disbanded by ministry order and replaced with an interim board formed by faculty and experts on July 31 last year.
The ministry said it is planning to use the property to provide self-defense and self-help classes and training on other defense-related affairs.
The ministry said it would continue to work with the interim board of the school to handle its properties and other assets.
Photo: CNA
In other news, the Ministry of Education (MOE) on Friday said the nation’s declining birthrate continues to affect the education sector, citing 47 schools’ opting to have the ministry “reserve” 3,171 student recruitment slots for the next academic year.
The MOE said that junior colleges and universities have “reserved” more than 50,000 recruitment slots with the ministry over the past three years, but only 1 percent of that reserved amount, about 500, has been redeemed.
Reserved recruitment slots mean there is a gap between the number of students an institution is allowed to enroll and the number it could enroll, meaning fewer than expected students are admitted.
Starting from 2014, the MOE has allowed schools to keep a certain number of ministry-approved quotas for student recruitment “in reserve”; for instance, schools allowed to recruit 100 students but assessed that they could only recruit 60 can “reserve” 40 student recruitment slots for later use.
The MOE said that while the recruitment slots remain “reserved” with the ministry, universities nationwide are reporting decreased enrollment.
Public universities have reserved 163 slots this year, while private universities reserved 452 slots, and 31 science and technology universities reserved 2,756, the ministry’s latest statistics showed.
Public universities reserved 334 slots this year, they showed, but the number is expected to rise to 520 in the next academic year, marking a record high.
On the other hand, private universities saw 5,564 reserved slots this year, but the number is expected to drop to 2,851 next year, the ministry said.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is pushing for residents of Kinmen and Lienchiang counties to acquire Chinese ID cards in a bid to “blur national identities,” a source said. The efforts are part of China’s promotion of a “Kinmen-Xiamen twin-city living sphere, including a cross-strait integration pilot zone in China’s Fujian Province,” the source said. “The CCP is already treating residents of these outlying islands as Chinese citizens. It has also intensified its ‘united front’ efforts and infiltration of those islands,” the source said. “There is increasing evidence of espionage in Kinmen, particularly of Taiwanese military personnel being recruited by the
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