Education Minister Cheng Jei-cheng said Wednesday that the government is planning to allow Chinese students to pursue higher education in Taiwan, albeit with certain restrictions. Cheng said the government's plan to open Taiwan to Chinese university hopefuls is still in the works, and that even if the opening is implemented, large numbers of Chinese students will not be allowed to enter the country in the initial stages. The education minister made the remarks during a meeting with presidents of Taiwan's privately run tertiary education institutions held at Chang Jung Christian University in Tainan County, southern Taiwan. Most presidents of the 35 privately run universities and colleges attending the meeting appealed to Cheng for permission to recruit Chinese students and in larger numbers, to help address the sagging enrollment rates they face. Cheng reiterated that under a tentative plan, the Ministry of Education (MOE) intends to allow national universities to recruit postgraduate students from China and to allow privately run universities and colleges to accept undergraduates from there. 'All details of the plan are still in the pipeline, ' he added, however. At the meeting, Hsuan Chuang University President Xia Cheng-hua said that due to Taiwan's declining birth rate, the number of high school graduates sitting the joint university entrance exam is expected to have shrunk by 40,000 by 2015 from this year's level of some 87,000. Xia suggested that the MOE should devise a floating student quota system to allow all the country's tertiary educational institutes to have quotas adjusted according to a single standard based on the number of freshmen set to enroll that year rather than on individual quotas based on the enrollment performance of the various institutes. Adopting a uniform student quota system based on the number of potential freshmen in the year will prevent some universities or colleges, particularly the private ones, from recruiting few or no students because of their poor enrollment performance, Xia explained. Cheng declined to comment on Xia's suggestion. The MOE unveiled a package of regulations in June to pave the way for local universities that are unable to recruit enough students to gradually leave the education market. Under the new regulations, universities that fail to recruit up to 70 percent of their officially approved student numbers for three consecutive years will have their annual quotas cut by between 10 percent and 30 percent. According to MOE statistics, enrollment at local tertiary educational institutes fell short of the target by nearly 60,000 in the 2008 school year, the largest shortfall in five years. The average freshman registration rate also fell to a five-year low of 82.98 percent, the statistics show. Twenty-four of the 162 universities and technology institutes in Taiwan -- all of them privately run -- saw their freshmen registration rates fall short of the 70 percent target in the 2008 school year and one of them even had a miserable registration rate of just 11.62 percent. Because of Taiwan's declining birth rate, the number of local university students has been dropping steadily. Out of concern that they may not be able to recruit enough students in the coming years, school authorities have pegged their hopes on Chinese students as a new source of income. 