If we start with the premise that university students are destined to either become creators or transmitters of human knowledge, large increases in their total numbers would augur well for future trends in the growth of human knowledge. (Obviously there's plenty of room for contribution by non-graduates--at least I hope so, as a non-graduate myself.)
If you are interested in the background of education in The People's Republic of China, I highly recommend this article in Wikipedia.
Here's an article by People's Daily, written in 2000, about China's plans to expand university enrollment. They cite the number of 2.04 million in 2000, and projected an increase of 1 million by the end of the year. But the article is really bad and really is not useful, other than as a signpost for further research. It did however, have the huge advantage of being the first return on a Google search for Chinese university enrollment.
The China Education and Research Network published a 2001 article writing about a goal to increase China's university enrollment to 15% (of 18-24 year olds) by 2010 from the then level of 10%.
A link at the bottom of the article led me to this announcement, which is a bit hard to decipher:
- China's universities and colleges enrolled 2.6 million freshmen in 2001, 800,000 more than last year.
- Officials with China's Ministry of Education said that China plans to increase the number of university students to 16 million in the five years to 2005, compared with a total enrollment of over 11 million in the 1996-2000 period.
- According to a special plan for educational development, university students will account for 15 percent of school students in 2005. By that time, the number of postgraduates will reach 600,000.
So this supports, in a roundabout way, the first piece--2000 level of 10% with projected rise to 15%, but target date of 2005. Let's see if we can find out how they did...
In 1977, despite the fact that 5.7 million students took the uniform national examinations, there were only 278,000 university places available for them. What a waste... By 1985, (if I am reading the Wikipedia article referenced above correctly), that had risen to 560,000 places (there were also 550,000 places for professional and technical schools). And we see above that they enrolled 2.6 million in 2001. That's essentially a ten-fold increase in 24 years. Well done, China. But sadly, that's only a CAGR of 9.76%.
For science and engineering, we read that China is now putting out about 600,000 graduates per year. This does not appear to be a huge increase--Wikipedia tells us that there were more than 1 million applicants for science and engineering places in 1984, and we can kind of infer that there were about 200,000 accepted, a CAGR of 5.12%.
It very much resembles the growth in science and engineering found in the United States between 1950 and 2000. But it doesn't even replace that growth, let alone overcome the shortfall in U.S. (and OECD) science and engineering since 2000.
As so often happens, I find more relevant research after I've written all the above. (You get to see the work in progress, FWIW...)
The Chinese Ministry of Education does publish enrollment figures. I found out thanks to Wang Yibing, former UNESCO higher education specialist and part time professor at Zhejiang University. In this article (PDF), Wang shows the MOE figures for Institutes of Higher Learning from 1998 to 2006. I reproduce them below.
It shows that growth of post-graduate enrollment since 1998 (from 725,000 to 3,648,000) does show a CAGR of 22.38%. We have another winner! This is truly exciting--these are post graduates, after all. It almost makes up for the disappointment in U.S. patents found earlier in the week. Now we just have to hope that they don't get hijacked into designing toys for U.S. consumers...
Enrollment at Institutes of Higher Learning overall in China since 1998 also shows a 21.21% CAGR, again, more than sufficient to double every five years! Hooray, China! I am reluctant to carry this analysis back to 1977, because I believe my prior numbers separate universities and other institutes of higher learning, but we just have to root for another 5-10 years of growth.
Click to see the numbers.
Year IHL Enrollment Post Graduate Enrollment
1998 1,083,000 725,000
1999 1,596,000 922,000
2000 2,206,000 1,285,000
2001 2,683,000 1,652,000
2002 3,205,000 2,026,000
2003 3,822,000 2,689,000
2004 4,473,000 3,263,000
2005 5,045,000 3,648,000
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