Demographic Change and Higher Education Governance: Evidence from Departmental Restructuring and Enrollment Dynamics in Taiwan’s TVET Institutions

Taiwan’s higher education system is undergoing profound demographic change as declining birthrates continue to reduce the size of incoming student cohorts. These demographic pressures pose significant challenges for institutional governance, enrollment management, and program sustainability, particularly within the technological and vocational education and training (TVET) sector, which relies heavily on stable freshman enrollment. Using five nationwide administrative datasets, this study conducts a longitudinal analysis of 1087 departmental restructuring cases implemented across 74 TVET institutions between 2020 and 2024. The restructuring strategies examined include renaming, mergers, additions, closures, and quota expansions. Fixed-effects regression models and multi-year enrollment trend analyses are employed to evaluate how different forms of departmental adjustment influence freshman enrollment outcomes. The results show that departmental renaming is the only strategy consistently associated with improved enrollment performance, particularly in private institutions. In contrast, mergers generally fail to generate positive enrollment effects, while closures are concentrated among programs with sustained low enrollment over multiple years. Newly established programs and quota expansions perform relatively well in fields aligned with strong labor market demand, such as healthcare and applied technologies. By providing large-scale, system-level empirical evidence, this study contributes to research on higher education policy, institutional governance, and enrollment management under demographic decline. The findings offer practical implications for administrators and policymakers seeking to design effective program adjustment strategies and support institutional resilience in higher education systems facing long-term population contraction.