This is a very complicated question involving work safety, training, out sourcing, illegal workers, government policy, social status, etc.
All I can say for now is, I’m willing to see those construction workers and machinists getting better training, better environment, and better pay. And it’d be very difficult to achieve if there were more workers than now. It would be easier to concentrate on educating a few workers, training them for management, and then they could improve the overall environment for the workers, regardless of their nationality. We just had an accident with 台鐵 that might could have been avoided from the very beginning. If only we have paid more attention to education, rather than diploma.
Interesting… I would guess that it may be like only 30% of older generation have a degree but 80% of younger generation, but I don’t have any statistics on this. I do know a number of folk who didn’t do college or didn’t finish, so I’m curious on the actual rates.
I didn’t mean to question your stats. I looked and found that number also, I think for ages 25-65. I do suspect that recent grads may be higher, as the older generation had fewer universities and far fewer spots.
I found this article on Inside Higher Ed which says that 95% of high school grads enroll in university:
“The percentage of high school graduates entering university reached 95 percent in 2008 and has remained constant since.However, this extremely high enrollment rate reflects the failure of the system to be selective and a decline of competitiveness within higher education.”
I also don’t know the high school graduation rate, which is pretty abysmal in the US.
No worries. Not my stats and I didn’t feel questioned. You said you were curious, so I found something for you.
I was confident that search term would give results because higher education happens to be my field of expertise (for several years I checked Inside Higher Ed, and the Chronicle of HE, daily), and I wasn’t disappointed. I was slightly curious myself, since I work in Taiwan HE now.
Enrolment and attainment are different things, because not everyone who signs up out of high school makes it all the way through to graduation.
As for the system failing to be selective, at least some of that goes back to the thread topic of declining population and the resultant declining student numbers. More universities are lowering their standards because the alternatives are to find good students abroad (very difficult) or go out of business. So, they are less selective in the local students they accept.
Interesting article, The China Factor stuff was mostly new information for me, Low Birthrate as we’ve been discussing on the thread. As for the problems of quality in Taiwanese universities, I choose ‘no comment’ in these early days
A degree doesn’t necessarily equate to competence or achievement.
For the past decade, Taiwan has had a problem with colleges issuing post-graduate degrees like crazy (especially the for-profit colleges). It has adversely affected the reputation of the PhD degree in Taiwan. It is true of most other countries, but it skews Taiwan statistics in particular.
