Government to cut higher education enrolment by 35%

Taiwan plans to cut enrolment at universities and graduate institutes by around 35% over the next decade due to a shrinking population caused by a notoriously low birth rate, write Hsu Chih-wei and Ted Chen for Focus Taiwan.

Enrolment targets in undergraduate and doctoral programmes are looking at 40% cuts, the Ministry of Education said last week at a conference of university presidents.

Taiwan only saw 1.065 births per woman in 2013, but experts say a rate of 2.1 births per woman is necessary to keep the population from shrinking. Huang Wen-ling, head of the Department of Higher Education, said that she is expecting enrolment to begin falling sharply in 2016. Enrolment in the year 2023 could be 310,000 people fewer than the figures recorded in 2013, according to Huang, which she estimated means a NT$30 billion (US$955 million) reduction in tuition revenues.
Full report on the Focus Taiwan site