As Taiwan’s birth rate continues to decline, the number of first-year university students is forecast to fall below 200,000 in the 2027-2028 school year for the first time, according to the National Development Council (NDC).
In its biennial forecast for Taiwan’s population for 2022-2070, the NDC said that for the 2022-2023 school year, which refers to the period from the second half of 2022 to the first half of 2023, the number of first-year university students, who are 18 years old, is expected to hit 219,000 but will gradually decline and dip below the 200,000 level to only 195,000 in the 2027-2028 school year.
According to the NDC, the population of first-year university students is expected to continue to fall to 188,000 in the 2036-2037 school year and then further to 113,000 in the 2070-2071 school year.
Taiwan has experienced a precipitous fall in its crude birth rate in the past two years to record lows of 7.01 per 1,000 in 2020 and 6.55 per 1,000 in 2021. The crude birth rate continued to lag in the first seven months of 2022, further stoking fears of a population implosion.
The biennial forecast of Taiwan’s population showed that Taiwan will become a “super-aged” society in 2025, with 20 percent of the population 65 or older.
In such a rapidly aging society, the number of students at all levels will fall by half to 1.66 million in the 2070-2071 school year from 3.39 million in the 2022-2023 school year, the NDC report showed.
The fall in the number of students at all levels is based on an assumption that the number of new births in Taiwan will drop to 80,000 in 2070, down by 60,000 or 43.4 percent from 2022 in the wake of the reduced number of 15-49 year-old potential mothers, the NDC said.
The NDC also said in the report that the working population was expected to become smaller than the dependent population by 2060, four years earlier than predicted in the 2020 report.
The working population refers to people aged 15-64, while those below and above the working age are considered to be dependents. The ratio of dependents to working-age people was 42.2 to 100 (or 1 to 2.37) in 2022, the council said in the report.
Taiwan’s population continued to decline in June, with the number of people falling by 1.2 percent year-on-year, according to a recent report released by the Ministry of the Interior.
The total population stood at 23,186,278 at the end of June, down by 301,231 people from the same month last year, and a drop of 0.8 percent, or 189,036 people, compared with six months ago, according to the MOI’s figures.
In June, Taiwan also recorded its highest number of deaths in one half of a year — 21,033 — in the first six months of 2022, exceeding the 20,000 threshold for the first time, the MOI’s data indicated.
Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel