As Taiwan’s birth rate falls, universities shut down one after the other

Taiwan has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, rivaled by neighbors like Japan, South Korea and Singapore. Last year, only 135,000 new babies were born. 

As fewer babies are born, that means fewer kids are going to school and onwards to university, resulting in 15 colleges closing their doors in Taiwan in the last decade. 

The Dahan Institute of Technology near Taiwan’s east coast city of Hualien will soon join them. 

Visitors will note that its campus is landscaped beautifully, with subtropical ferns and other native plants. Classrooms brim with shiny new equipment. The only thing that’s missing is students. 

Bells ring on campus every hour, but barely anyone’s around to hear them. Over 7,000 people used to study at Dahan, mostly specializing in vocational subjects like restaurant management. Now, only a handful of students remain. In just a few more months, the campus will close its doors for good, joining four other colleges that shut down in Taiwan last year. 

“You can see those classrooms now are empty, no students,” said You Li-fang, a professor at Dahan Institute. “It shows that we are shutting down. For real.”

You Li-fang has spent her entire professional life — 31 years to be exact — teaching at Dahan and serving as a department chair. Most of her classes were in civil engineering and environmental management. 

She said something that made the college special was that two out of every five students at Dahan were from Taiwan’s Indigenous communities. 

“I think the poor will become much poorer because they will lose opportunities,” You said. “I’m so mad about that.”

You herself isn’t Indigenous — she’s from the Han ethnic majority who originally migrated to the island from China — but that didn’t stop her from dedicating a huge part of her career to her Indigenous students. 

One of You’s former students, Chen Xiao-dong, is a third-year student at Dahan. He comes from the Indigenous Truku community, which mostly lives in northeastern Taiwan. 

“Our community held a meeting to talk about the Dahan Institute closing,” Chen said. “Most of the young people there relied on Dahan as a stepping stone to opening their own restaurants, managing tour companies in their communities or learning technical skills to get higher-paying jobs.”  

Chen said that if Dahan closed, most of the young people in his Truku community wouldn’t have any other option for career-based education nearby. Many young people in his community have to take care of their parents or work, and can’t study too far away from home. 

Many of the colleges closing are in less developed areas in Taiwan’s south and east. When a college closes, Taiwan’s Ministry of Education finds its students alternative schools to complete their degree programs, but these are often further away from home.  

The enrollment crisis is most keenly felt in the outer regions of Taiwan. But even in the capital of Taipei, high-performing schools aren’t exempt. 

Last week, at a public hearing at Shih Hsin, a private university in Taipei, dozens of students protested the school’s decision to cancel any undergraduate course that gets fewer than 30 students to sign up. 

Zhang Zhi-lun was there supporting the students and teachers. He’s an alum of Shih Hsin and the executive secretary for Taiwan’s higher education union. 

“In recent years, many universities have closed down, due to the low birth rate,” Zhang said. “But many are using the pressure of the low birth rate issue and the possibility of closing down to degrade the rights of students and teachers and their job security.” 

The school, however, says it’s dealing with funding issues related to the enrollment issue and decreasing public subsidies, and it has to save money wherever it can. 

Faced with declining enrollment, Hou said, the easiest shortcut most colleges can take is to enroll more international students. But offering courses in English and making other changes to globalize a campus takes resources.

“The top research universities probably have this capacity, but for smaller private universities in the eastern and southern regions, their capacity is probably not sufficient,” she said. 

Although university revenues are often declining, colleges in Taiwan are also increasingly being run as businesses, said Angela Yung-chi Hou, a professor who researches higher education at National Chengchi University in Taipei. “In the US, higher education is very marketized, [and] now in Taiwan, it’s quite similar,” she said.

Schools like Dahan Institute of Technology, in eastern Taiwan, unfortunately, don’t have the resources to replace local students with international ones. 

In Taiwan, university closings have become a society-level problem without easy solutions. And for the communities that these closures leave behind, they’re a loss that can’t easily be replaced.