Chapter 5: Higher Education

The landscape of China’s higher education has changed profoundly since the late 1990s. Previously, China had a very low gross tertiary enrolment ratio. The situation began to change in 1999 when the government expanded the new intakes by a huge 48%. In 1998, the number of new enrollees was slightly above one million; it increased to 5.5 million in 2006, growing at a pace rarely seen in the world’s education history. The unprecedented expansion pushed China into the stage of mass higher education in the early 2000s, with 15% of the age cohort (18–22) having access to higher education.