East Asian academics face deteriorating conditions

Academics in Japan and Taiwan are ageing and increasingly hard-pressed, while those in Cambodia and Vietnam are struggling with a growing demand for higher education, a survey of thousands of researchers shows.

Just one-tenth of academics surveyed in Japan in 2012-14 and fewer than a third in Taiwan said that their working conditions had improved since 2011-12.

In comparison more than 70 per cent of Vietnamese and 67 per cent of Cambodian academics said their conditions were better than before, according to a paper by Futao Huang, a professor of higher education at Hiroshima University in Japan.