don’t be surprised, there will be more graduate students in the future
2024-09-20
한어Русский языкEnglishFrançaisIndonesianSanskrit日本語DeutschPortuguêsΕλληνικάespañolItalianoSuomalainenLatina
lanzhou university recently announced that the total number of graduate students will exceed the total number of undergraduate students for the first time in 2024. according to reports, in recent years, the scale of graduate student enrollment at lanzhou university has been expanding year by year, and in 2019 the annual number of graduate students has exceeded that of undergraduates.
image source: lanzhou university wechat official account
as soon as the news came out, it attracted widespread attention from the media and triggered extensive discussions among netizens.
some people are worried that the depreciation of academic qualifications caused by the expansion of the graduate student population will increase the employment pressure on college students:
more people said that it is not uncommon for the number of graduate students to exceed that of undergraduate students, especially in famous universities such as 985.
the upside-down relationship between undergraduate and graduate studies? not a "new thing" or an "isolated case"
in fact, relevant media paid attention to this phenomenon last year and reported that "among the 285,000 college graduates in beijing, the number of master's and doctoral graduates exceeded that of undergraduates for the first time."
according to data released by the ministry of education, in 2023, the total number of students enrolled in general and vocational undergraduate programs nationwide was 10.4222 million, an increase of 2.73% over the previous year; the total number of graduate students enrolled nationwide was 1.3017 million, an increase of 4.76% over the previous year. among them, 153,300 doctoral students were enrolled, an increase of 10.29% over the previous year.
if we compare the first year of the “big enrollment expansion” in 1998, the undergraduate enrollment increased by nearly 9 times, while the graduate enrollment increased by more than 17 times! in comparison, the growth rate of graduate students is much higher than that of undergraduates.
especially judging from the data of some of the top 985 schools, the number of graduate students enrolled is often more than twice that of undergraduates, which is more than inverted!
fudan university has 15,651 new students in 2022, of which 74% are doctoral and master's students, and only 4,120 are undergraduates, accounting for about 26%.
since 2020, shanghai jiao tong university has enrolled more than 4,000 undergraduate students, while the number of graduate students has always been over 10,000, reaching 12,486 in 2024. in the past five years, the number of graduate students has been more than twice the number of undergraduate students.
judging from the enrollment data in 2024, the number of graduate students enrolled in the vast majority of 985 universities exceeds that of undergraduate students. among them, the number of graduate students enrolled in top universities such as tsinghua, peking university, fudan university and jiaotong university is more than twice that of undergraduate students. the number of new graduate students in many 985 universities has exceeded 10,000.
from this we can see that the size of graduate students has exceeded that of undergraduate students. this has not only been the case for a long time and is not surprising, but it is also the case in most prestigious universities.
it is not a simple expansion of enrollment, but a historic adjustment of the talent training structure.
at the end of 2023, a document on optimizing and adjusting the structure of graduate education was officially released. the "opinions of the ministry of education on deepening the classification development of academic degree and professional degree graduate education" pointed out that with the focus on major national strategies, key areas and major social needs, we will promote the classified training of academic and practical innovative talents, further increase the proportion of professional degree graduate students, expand the enrollment scale of master's professional degree graduate students to about two-thirds of the total enrollment scale of master's graduate students by the end of the "14th five-year plan", and significantly increase the number of doctoral professional degree graduate students.
among the 12,486 new graduate students at shanghai jiao tong university in 2024, 8,221 are masters and 4,265 are doctors. the main degree type of master's students is professional master's, accounting for about 68.95%; the main degree type of doctoral students is academic doctoral, accounting for about 72.12%.
image source: shanghai jiao tong university wechat official account
according to lanzhou university, the university has been continuously optimizing disciplines and majors in the past three years, adding a number of doctoral and master's programs such as materials and chemical engineering, energy and power, and biosafety. graduate students in newly added disciplines and majors that meet national needs have become an important part of the expansion of the total number of graduate students. lanzhou university said that the total number of graduate students in comprehensive and research universities exceeds that of undergraduates, which is an important step in building a high-level research university.
from the perspective of building a strong country in education, the expansion of the scale of postgraduate education, especially the expansion of the scale of postgraduate training in high-level universities, is an inevitable choice of national strategy.
"this decision is directly related to the difficult development environment china is facing today. it is the key to solving the problem of supporting high-quality development with high-level scientific and technological self-reliance," said chen zhiwen, editor-in-chief of china education online.
"the united states and other western countries no longer train high-level talents for us, so we must strengthen the quality and ability of independent talent training. against this background, the 2020 national graduate education conference was upgraded. since then, the state has decided to significantly expand the scale of graduate training, especially the scale of doctoral students." chen zhiwen said.
most of the attention and heated discussions on this issue may be due to concerns about the quality of postgraduate education and academic involution.
in recent years, the employment of graduate students from famous universities has been sinking across the board, with many of them working in small towns and primary and secondary schools. this phenomenon is certainly related to the enthusiasm for employment within the system, but it is also related to the substantial increase in the number of graduates and graduate students from famous universities.
an inevitable objective factor for the increasing number of people taking postgraduate entrance examinations is the depreciation of diplomas themselves due to the popularization of higher education.
"from the perspective of scarcity alone, some of today's college students are not as good as high school and vocational high school students in 1998. it is neither possible nor realistic to expect a college diploma to lead to a decent job," said chen zhiwen.
obviously, it is not a wise choice to choose to study for a master's degree only for employment reasons. going back to the basics of graduate education, as an education aimed at cultivating high-level talents, the key is the love and interest in the major itself.
however, my country's universities still have a long way to go in terms of further highlighting the support and contribution of postgraduate education to high-quality development.
this article is an original work of china education online. please indicate the source when reprinting: reprinted from china education online
text: huang zhuo
chart: yang feifei
references:
the paper: "the total number of graduate students at lanzhou university exceeds that of undergraduates for the first time, and many universities have already experienced an inverted relationship between undergraduate and graduate students"
chen zhiwen's observation on the official account "why do the number of graduate students in famous universities exceed that of undergraduates?"
· national education development statistical bulletin and other public data from the ministry of education
· public data from relevant universities
