The aftershocks of Taiwan’s steadily decreasing birth rate are beginning to catch up to its 158 universities, forcing institutions with shrinking enrollment rates to face the daunting question of whether to merge or close for good.

Over the past decade, a total of 10 Taiwanese universities have already merged or shut down. The most recent merger was finalized in 2018, when three Kaohsiung schools merged to form National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology, now Taiwan’s largest technological university. And three universities in Yunlin and Pingtung are now considering a mega-merger of their own.

This is just the beginning. According to the Ministry of Education, up to 12 of Taiwan’s 51 public universities, and up to 40 of its 101 private universities, will merge or close by 2023. These moves will have serious consequences for students, teachers, and the communities in which these universities operate.

To fight the trend, the government is employing numerous strategies to persuade the most affected institutions to merge or shut down.

But these universities are grasping onto anything they can to survive.

“We are going to have a crisis for university education,” said Dr. Jack Tzu-hsiang Yu, vice president of Taipei’s Shih Hsin University.

At present, there are approximately 240,000 university students in Taiwan. However, by the year 2028, this number will decrease to 160,000.

“The public universities will take 80,000 of those students, leaving only 80,000 students for the 100-plus private universities,” Yu said.

“This means, eight years from now, we are going to have a serious crisis as maybe half of the private universities will close due to low enrollments and their faculty members, staff, and professors will lose their jobs.”

An Overabundance of Universities

Taiwan’s abundance of higher education institutes dates back to the end of the martial law period in 1987 when the government began to deregulate and decentralize the education system.

After the 410 Demonstration for Education Reform in 1994, a landmark event in which Taiwanese took to the streets to demand the liberalization and decentralization of higher education, Mao Kao-wen, then Taiwan’s minister of education, initiated a comprehensive reform of the education system—a scheme which included the establishment of more high schools and tertiary institutions to provide citizens greater access to higher education.

Following these reforms, the number of universities in Taiwan boomed, increasing from 123 in 1994 to a peak of 162 in 2013. By 2008, the percentage of high school graduates entering university had reached 95%.

“In the past, the government’s goal was to popularize university education so that everyone could get a degree,” Yu said. “However, they underestimated the decreasing rate of our population.”

“It is a crazy situation to have.”

Yu said that although Shih Hsin’s current enrollment rate sits at a healthy 95%, they couldn’t feel too relaxed as the enrollments were boosted by students born during 2000 and 2001 in the Chinese Year of the Dragon—the year in which most people prefer to give birth.

“In September next year, we will face the first wave of the crisis because will receive students from the Year of the Snake and student numbers will drop by 30,000 for the whole of Taiwan,” Yu said.

“At Shih Hsin, our enrollment rate won’t drop as low as 60% or 40%, but even if we hit 89%, this will be alarming.”

For those private universities that are failing to attract a sufficient number of students – that is, their enrollments are lower than 3,000 for that year, or if the freshman enrollment rate has been lower than 60% for two consecutive years—the Ministry of Education will intervene, the university’s government subsidy will be reduced, and it will eventually be forced to close.

In 2019 alone, six universities suffered an enrollment rate lower than 60%. These included Toko University at 37.23%, St. John’s University at 43.10%, Tatung Institute of Technology at 46.10%, Christ’s College Taipei at 50%, Taiwan Shoufu University at 52.10%, and Fortune Institute of Technology at 58.01%.

“All universities, even those above the death line, still think we are in a crisis, or at least in a risky situation, and are doing their best to attract those remaining students,” Yu said.

“This is why the universities most at risk of closure are using all the tools at their disposal to maintain the minimum number of students, as once they reach it, they will be forced to close and all the money they invested in the school—the land and all the buildings—will go to the government.”

Universities Look South for Students

In their bid to stay afloat, universities have employed a number of strategies, including allowing master’s degree students to write their thesis on topics unrelated to their department, engaging in abnormal relationships with brokers to attract foreign students, or requiring faculty members to play the role of a salesperson wherein their salary becomes dependent on the number of enrollments they secure.

A decline in the number of Chinese student enrollments due to strained cross-strait relations over the last two years has delivered an additional blow, particularly for private universities dependent on revenue from higher tuition fees.

“In the past, students from mainland China were a key source of income, but because of the political reasons, their numbers have been reduced,” Yu said. “Those universities struggling the most with enrollments now can’t get students from this channel, so that makes things even worse.”

The administration of Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) hopes to replace this vacancy with students from Southeast Asia under the New Southbound Policy, with a total of 8,000 South East Asian students arriving in Taiwan to study in the last three years.

The initiative has not gone entirely smoothly. In 2019, six universities in Taiwan were accused of forcing exchange students from Indonesia, the Philippines and other countries to work long hours in factories and attend classes just two days a week. One online advertisement from Tungnan University which circulated last year advertised foreign students to employers as “highly cooperative” and willing to do “taxing, filthy and dangerous shift work.” The incidents sparked an uproar and led Taiwan’s Ministry of Education to publicly promise to examine the work-study programs.

As far as public universities are concerned, the government’s initiative has been to encourage universities to merge. In 2005, the government promoted a strategy encouraging national normal universities, which small-scale universities that primarily train teachers, to merge with national universities. Prior to the implementation of this policy, there were nine education universities in Taiwan. Several mergers later, this number has been reduced to two.

However, merging can be a controversial process. Take, for example, the 2016 merger between National Hsinchu University of Education and National Tsing Hua University, which initially sparked protests and opposition from both sides: staff and alumni from Hsinchu were afraid that their quality of teaching and reputation as a high ranking university might suffer, while staff from Tsing Hua were concerned about their continued employment prospects following the merger and the absence of a physical campus for their current alumni.

To Taipei deputy mayor Tsai Ping-kun (蔡炳坤), the merger was both necessary and beneficial.

“If the two universities did not merge, then Hsinchu University, the smaller one, would have been forced to close due to the reduction in enrollments,” Tsai said. “The merger also allowed Tsing Hua University to gain an education-specific college, which it did not previously have, making it a top choice university for teaching students.”

Private universities can also merge when they have the same executive board. This was demonstrated in 2018 when Kang-Ning Junior College of Medical Care and Management merged with the University of Kang Ning. However, this is rare.

Rarer still is a merger between a private and public university which, although possible, seldom occurs due to the different ownership structures.

Tsai said that universities in Taiwan cannot survive solely by fighting for students within a limited population—they have to go abroad.

“If a university is ultimately going to close, it should just close,” he said. “But for those that are going to maintain and survive, they will be forced to undergo a rigorous process to increase their educational quality.”

“If universities are successful in improving their quality, Taiwan will be able to attract top-quality students from all over the world, not just from our neighboring regions.”

Private Universities Struggle to Find Solutions

However, according to Yu, many people in the private system believe the only way forward is for the government to shrink public university enrollment numbers, thereby increasing the number of enrollments in the private university system.

Yu said that because Taiwanese students overwhelmingly choose public universities as their first choice when applying for university, their “death line” is considerably higher than that of private universities. He also said that, as they are government-funded, public universities are better positioned to take some risks in lowering their admittance rate.

Another strategy would be for private universities to voluntarily lower their acceptance rate and to focus more on each individual student. However, Yu said this is impossible due to caps on student tuition imposed by the government. If private universities voluntarily decrease their student numbers but cannot raise the tuition fee to compensate for the loss of income, he explained, they will not be able to continue to operate.

Despite petitioning the government for 10 years, an increase in the tuition cap has never been approved.

Raising the tuition cap would be a controversial move, as students from higher socio-economic backgrounds tend to attend public universities with lower tuition fees, while students from lower socio-economic backgrounds are more likely to enroll at private universities with higher tuition fees. It would become more difficult for these students to afford a university education if the cap is increased.

“Without this [tuition cap increase], if you go to our president or owner saying we should voluntarily have fewer students, they will say—ridiculous. We are good enough to have almost 100% registration rate, and you are trying to cut off your own hand?” Yu said.

Thanks to Shih Hsin’s tradition, history, location, and high ranking as a communications university, Yu said the university will be safe in the coming enrollment crisis. However, they will still feel its effects, particularly in the decline of their student’s academic inclination.

“As the number of students decreases, we will increasingly receive students from lower socio-economic backgrounds whose families who cannot support them to pursue purely academic degrees,” Yu said. “These students tend to choose degrees which transition directly into a job.”

“This means that there will be a switch back to making departments more career-oriented to suit our students’ backgrounds. But for a university, when you can only have those practical departments, it is a sad thing.”

Declining university student enrollments are just one of many of the social stresses Taiwanese society will be forced to come to terms due to declining birth rates.

Although the government is tackling the problem by pushing for mergers or encouraging institutions to close, this is a controversial and sensitive process for students, staff, alumni and the community, and universities themselves are left to fight for their lives.

Change is a necessary result of having fewer children, and how each university adjusts to the coming crisis will determine whether they can emerge safely on the other side, offering a higher quality of education to the students that remain, or will be forced to close their doors for good.

Bethany Green is in Taiwan on a New Colombo Plan scholarship. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the views of the Australian Government.

(Cover photo via Taiwan Presidential Office, CC BY 2.0)