Recently, the Ministry of Education (MOE) of Taiwan released the statistics of the number of Taiwanese students studying abroad for 2018. 

 Key findings:

l   According to Image 1, the number of students obtaining a student visa from foreign countries has risen to 40,009, compared to 39,853 in 2016-2017. There are most Taiwanese students gaining visa in the USA with the number of 13,887, followed by 5,806 in Australia and 5,422 in Japan. 

l   Although USA and Australia are within the top ranks, the result showed that their YoY decreased compared to 2016, decreasing 3.2% and 11.83%. However, Canada and Germany experienced strong YoY growth, with 20.21% and 8.67% growth respectively.016-2017. There are most Taiwanese students gaining visa in the USA with the number of 13,887, followed by 5,806 in Australia and 5,422 in Japan.

Image 2

l   More than 11,000 Taiwanese choose to study abroad in Asia, with the majority choosing Japan. The number of Taiwanese students in Japan has been increasing for the past five years, officially over 10,000.

l   There are more than 21,000 Taiwanese students studying in the US and 5,300 in Canada, which countries ranked top 1 and 2.

l   There were about 8,000 Taiwanese studying in Europe. While the UK used to dominate the market, now Germany is catching up with double-digit growth rate each year.

Analysis

● Taiwan is still a very strong market for study abroad if you measure it on a per capita basis. However, what the data is showing us is that Taiwanese today are considering a broader range of options than just US, UK, Canada & Australia, expanded to countries in Europe and Asia.

● We feel that the increase in student enrollment to Canada, Australia, and Japan is the direct result of the working holiday partnership between these countries and Taiwan. The data shows a "spillover" effect from the working holiday scheme. Students tend to go over to these countries through the Working Holiday scheme, then they decide that they would like to stay there a bit longer and some of them stay on to pursue more education and eventually, the students may eventually choose to immigrate there.

● The implication of these trends is that it is becoming more challenging for schools to recruit these students as many of these students are bypassing agents entirely.