Taiwan's Youth Career Confusion: Sixteen Years of School, and the Most Common Sentence After Graduation Is 'I Don't Know What I Want to Do'

30-second overview: Taiwan's university net enrollment rate rose from 26% in 1994 to 72% in 2020, while the number of universities expanded from 58 to 140. Nearly every young person can attend university — yet the most common question after graduation has not changed: "I don't know what I want to do." Two national surveys — the Youth Affairs Council in 2006 and the Ministry of Education in 2009 — both found that employers valued "good work attitude" and "stability and stress resilience" most highly, while the school system continued to invest resources in "professional knowledge and technical skills." This misalignment has persisted for nearly twenty years without correction.

A University Student's Course Selection Logic

In 2023, a Taiwanese university professor described a phenomenon in her research: the criteria students used to select courses had come to resemble consumers picking products off a shelf.¹

Is this course useful for finding a job? Can it add a line to a resume? Will the professor fail students? Is the grading generous? These questions have displaced "what am I interested in?" and "how does knowledge in this field change the way I understand the world?" — and become the core considerations students use to decide what to study each semester.

Education philosopher Li Feng-ru notes that under the neoliberal trend of tightly coupling education with the job market, "learning" has been alienated from exploration and understanding into a form of job preparation training. Students rarely approach learning with a sense of mission toward knowledge discovery; the goal of learning has deviated from its core — "knowledge and understanding that allows one to exercise potential or enact transformation in diverse contexts" — toward "skills for demonstrating competence in the workplace."¹

This description might sound like a criticism of students for being purely utilitarian. But if you zoom out, the root of the problem lies outside the students themselves.

The Thirty Years That Took Universities from 58 to 140

On April 10, 1994, Taiwan saw its largest education protest since the postwar period. More than twenty civil society groups formed the "4-10 Alliance for Education Reform" and took to the streets; one of their four demands was "build more senior high schools and universities." That September, the Executive Yuan established the "Education Reform Council," chaired by Nobel laureate Lee Yuan-tseh.²

The Reform Council issued four advisory reports over two years, ultimately releasing the Comprehensive Report on Education Reform in December 1996. The core proposition regarding higher education was captured in a word borrowed from economics: "deregulation."¹

"Educational deregulation" was first proposed at the Reform Council's third committee meeting, and from that point became the core concept of the reform. The First Advisory Report stated directly: "The government's excessive regulation of education remains the greatest, broadest, and deepest obstacle to educational modernization." Deregulation was "the primary task of educational reform at the current stage."³

Under this framework, the government's role shifted from "regulator" to "resource provider and enabler." Expansion of university numbers was encouraged to be led by private resources. Specific measures included: suspension of approving new public universities; encouraging private individuals to establish schools; changing private school establishment from an "approval system" to a "notification system."³

The results were explosive in numerical terms. The number of cram schools tripled after the reforms,⁸ and the number of universities expanded from 58 in 1994 (23 universities, 35 colleges) to nearly triple within a decade, reaching 145 by 2004. Private universities grew from 26 in 1994 to 94 by 2020, their share rising from 44.8% to 67.14%.¹

The university net enrollment rate went from 26.26% in 1994, to 35.43% in 1999, breaking 53.2% in 2004, and reaching 72.10% in 2020 — 2.75 times the 1994 figure.¹

The Seventh Republic of China Education Yearbook's chapters on "University Education" and "Technical and Vocational Education" fully document the institutional context of this expansion.¹² In the language of sociology of education, Taiwan completed the transition of higher education from an "elite" to a "universal" model in less than twenty years. But the driving force behind this transition was always market logic more than educational ideals.

And universalization did not produce equity. The Reporter cited research by National Taiwan University economist Lin Ming-jen showing that "the wealthier the family, the higher the probability of the child entering NTU," and that the national universities' "low tuition, high subsidy" policy in practice channeled more public resources to children of higher-income families.¹⁰ The beneficiaries of higher education expansion were often not the disadvantaged groups the reforms claimed to help.

What Employers Want and What Schools Teach Are Two Different Things

In 2006, the Executive Yuan Youth Affairs Council commissioned scholars including Liu Meng-chi to conduct a "Survey on Employability of Taiwan's College Graduates." The survey asked both graduates and employers: what are the most important employability capabilities?⁴

The answers were highly consistent — but pointed in a completely different direction from what schools teach.

In both the 2006 and 2009 surveys, the top three core employability capabilities cited by graduates and employers alike barely changed:

"Professional knowledge and technical skills" ranked fourth in 2006 and dropped to seventh in 2009.⁴

In other words, what the workplace most needs — attitude, resilience, communication — are things related to how one is as a person. What the school system excels at teaching — knowledge and technical skills — is not what employers are looking for.

Counseling and guidance scholar Wu Chih-yi, after comparing employability skill frameworks from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the EU, identified a core observation: the common content of employability across countries can be grouped into four major categories: "personal traits/attitudes," "learning/thinking," "interpersonal/social," and "career development." But Taiwan's Ministry of Education-led higher education system has clearly placed greater emphasis on the "learning/thinking" category, reflecting the inertia of traditional higher education's focus on transmitting disciplinary knowledge.⁴

What makes matters more complicated is that the government itself was also repeatedly wavering on the definition of "employability." From the Council of Labor Affairs' "common core competencies" in 2005 (three categories, sixteen hours of courses), to the Youth Affairs Council's "core employability" in 2006 (eight items), to the Ministry of Education's graduate tracking platform's "employment competency indicators" in 2009 (four major categories, twenty-four items), to the UCAN University Employability Competency Assessment Platform's "common workplace competencies" in 2011 (eight items) — each version used different classification methods and item names, with confusing correspondences between them.⁴

When even the government cannot clearly articulate what "employability" is, expecting schools to cultivate it becomes hollow. Some scholars have bluntly observed that nearly three decades of educational reform has had gaping holes in its policy evaluation research, and many reform measures were never rigorously assessed for effectiveness.⁹

How Education Became Vocational Training

The root of this problem can be traced back to that word borrowed from economics in the Reform Council's reports: "deregulation."

Huang Wu-hsiung, the leader of the 4-10 Alliance for Education Reform, pointed out as early as 1996: "The choice of educational reform path is, at its core, an ideological question." Carefully analyzing the logic underlying education reform discourse reveals that it was saturated with neoliberal vocabulary: globalization, marketization, privatization, commodification, competition, accountability, efficiency.⁵

Critical pedagogy research further analyzes this phenomenon, noting that the Reform Council's members were dominated by neoliberal thinking from the outset; the deregulation-centered education reform policy in effect legitimized academic capitalism and new public managerialism, rendering all other competitors in the education reform field — the professional education community, students, teachers, parents — powerless to resist.¹

One of the consequences was the "vocational-training-ification of learning." Under neoliberalism's logic of coupling education with the market, "entering school is for work" and "education is preparation for future employment" became self-evident propositions. The reason for a university's existence was rewritten: from cultivating learners with broad minds, knowledge, and understanding, to equipping students with the key competencies defined by business for the corporate workplace. The root of the so-called "education-employment gap" lies here.¹

Giroux, in one interview, offered a sharp warning about this:

Higher education will become another ideological machine devoted to training rather than education, stifling rather than cultivating imagination.⁶

The Problem That Ten Indicators Couldn't Solve

In 2010, a focus group discussion involving nine scholars and experts, after two and a half hours of deliberation, identified ten localized core employability indicators: expression and communication, problem-solving, teamwork, lifelong learning, self-management, innovation and adaptation, technology application, career planning, workplace awareness, and international perspective.⁴ This framework placed "personal traits/attitudes" at the foundation, with "learning/thinking" and "interpersonal/social" as two main pillars, and "career development" as the bridge between the individual and the workplace.

The indicators were built — but educational practice did not follow. Universities remained driven by paper count, international rankings, and competitive grant funding. Teacher promotion and continued employment depended on research output, not on "whether students were taught how to communicate." In both the 2006 and 2009 Youth Affairs Council surveys, employers' top three priorities remained work attitude, stress resilience, and communication skills.⁴ Not one of these three capabilities was taught in any required university course.

The Three-Layer Root of "I Don't Know What I Want to Do"

Back to the original question: why do Taiwanese university students not know what they want to do after graduation?

The answer is embedded in three layers.

The first layer: career education has never been part of the formal curriculum. Taiwan's elementary and secondary schools have no independent career education subject. The 108 Curriculum Guidelines tucked career exploration into the "Comprehensive Activity Domain," which under college entrance pressure is often compressed into two classes per semester as a formality. By the time students reach university, "career guidance" falls under the Employment Counseling Division of Student Affairs, counts for no credits, and is not required. A CommonWealth Education Media survey found that more than 50% of students felt their learning portfolios had no significant impact on career exploration.⁷

The second layer: schools teach "sellable skills" but skip "who you are." Employability frameworks in Western countries all place "personal traits/attitudes" at the foundation: self-management, self-affirmation, stress adaptation, proactive initiative. But Taiwan's educational budget and class time is concentrated on knowledge transmission and exam preparation. "What kind of person do you want to become?" — this question, from elementary school through university, has never been seriously addressed in any class.⁴

The third layer: the purpose of education has been displaced by the market. Aronowitz, in The Knowledge Factory, cried out that universities should give students "true higher learning," allowing them to exercise their potential in diverse contexts.¹¹ But the logic of marketization has turned universities into vocational training centers. In 2024, the median starting salary for Taiwanese university graduates was still hovering around NT$30,000; the wage premium that a degree can cash out continues to shrink. Students spent sixteen years in school only to discover on graduation day that they neither know what they want to do nor have learned what employers actually care about.

In 2022, Taiwan's newborn population dropped to 138,986, with a total fertility rate of approximately 1.08 — one of the lowest in the world (per National Development Council statistics). The university "market" is shrinking; private universities are beginning to exit. When a university has to answer "why should students choose you," perhaps this is the moment to ask again about the purpose of education: which is more important — helping a twenty-year-old know who they are and what they want, or teaching them a marketable skill?

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