With cannons on campus, its own Qing-dynasty wall and the first Dutch fort in Taiwan nearby, National Cheng Kung University seems an appealing place for a budding historian. However, after a first round of applications, no students had accepted places in the history department for next year. It is a shock for the university, ranked third in Taiwan.
In much of East Asia, universities face a demographic crisis. In Japan the population of 18-year-olds has been declining since the 1990s. In Taiwan, the undergraduate population has dipped by more than a quarter in the past decade. Experts in South Korea talk of an “enrolment cliff”, as 3.6 million students in 2010 fell to 3 million last year.
This has hit humanities and social-sciences departments hard. Faced with a more uncertain economic environment than their parents, students want to study subjects that will lead to well-paid jobs. These are mostly in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Private universities, which educate most students in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, often depend on tuition fees, and therefore most need to adapt to students’ wishes to stay afloat. In South Korea, 18 private universities have closed for good since 2000.
What’s to be done? Universities have managed to increase foreign student numbers, but not enough to offset demographic decline. But efforts to increase the rate of university-going among locals could still bear fruit. In Japan, the growth in female students has meant that the university population increased slightly over a decade.
In Singapore, the number of students continues to rise, even as the traditional university-age population is falling, through policies which encourage older student cohorts to enroll.
Singapore’s government, while fond of STEM subjects, also stresses the importance of social sciences and the humanities for policymaking. The number of students in these faculties is growing.