TAIPEI: The education authorities have been making preparations to help local and particularly private universities to gradually leave the education market in the event that they continue to fail to recruit enough students, said Wu Ching-chi, the top official in charge of education affairs, yesterday.

Speaking at a Legislative Yuan committee session, Wu said his office has made the preparations in view of the fact that an exit mechanism will be necessary sooner or later as enrollments in privately-run colleges and universities continue to decline.

According to a recent official report, enrollments in privately run tertiary education institutes have continued to decline over the past two years, with enrollments falling short of the target by 6,802 in the 2009 school year.

By 2012, private colleges and universities will have suffered a combined enrollment shortfall of 71,000 if the shortfall increases by a rate of 2 percent annually, according to the report.

For the worst-case scenarios, the report said, the authorities will put forth regulations regarding how students should be transferred, how faculty should be laid off and how the education authorities should financially assist those institutes that are forced to close.

One factor in the declining enrollments is declining birthrates in recent years, with Taiwan ranking 211th out of 224 populations surveyed, Hong Kong having the lowest birth rate of all (CIA World Factbook, 2009).

The education authorities unveiled a package of regulations in June to pave the way for local universities that have failed government evaluations or are 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 will have their annual quotas cut by between 10 percent and 30 percent.

As a result of the regulations, no local universities will see their student quotas slashed until the 2011 school year, which critics say will hold back domestic education reforms.

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 school year, with one of them even having a miserable registration rate of just 11.62 percent.

China Daily/CNA

(HK Edition 10/13/2009 page2)