An analyzing case: Numbers of Taiwanese students and their expenditures by using grey system theory to forecast

Abstract

Taiwan is one of the Asian tigers with the education is directly linked to the quality of high-qualified human resources for supplying to the domestic labor market and the innovating industry. However, from the years 2010s, Taiwan higher education has been in emergency of dealing with the difficulty of demographic in the context of education increased desires in recent years. This study adapted data from Taiwanese Ministry of Education with the raising quantity of student from 1,326,029 (2007) to 1,346,221 (2014) together with the student's expenditure is approximately at 200,000NTD/year. Grey system theory is applied in this study with the three models GM (1, 1), DGM (1, 1) and Verhulst which are then chosen the most appropriate one. GM (1, 1) forecasts the increasing in student's expenditure about 36% to the future together with the downward in trends of student in the highest-percentage majors i.e. Social Sciences, Business and Law, Engineering, meanwhile, the impressive upward trends are in Humanities and Art, Service (from 10% to 15% up). In addition, the study also sees that the development scale of adult is becoming stable, the affordability of residents to adult higher education, the level of economic development and so forth. The research's result could be an advantage reference to education managers for dealing with the issues from quantity. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by IASE. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.