Postgraduates outnumber undergraduates on top Chinese campuses

Rapid growth in PhD recruitment has contributed to postgraduate students now outnumbering undergraduates at many leading Chinese universities.

So-called topsy-turvy enrolment has attracted widespread attention in China in recent weeks after Lanzhou University, the leading institution in the country’s north, announced that its postgraduate cohort outnumbered its undergraduate roll for the first time this year.

It has since emerged that a similar situation exists at more than 50 leading universities participating in the Double First-Class excellence initiative, including top-tier institutions such as Peking, Tsinghua, Fudan and Zhejiang universities.

Enrolment on master’s courses has soared in China in recent years, driven in part by a sluggish employment market for graduates.

But annual data from the Ministry of Education also reveals that the number of PhD graduates from Chinese universities has increased by 14.3 per cent over the past decade, while the growth rate in academic staff has stayed at about 3 per cent, raising questions for some about the quality of doctoral education and the career opportunities on offer for those who do complete their course.

Jiabin Zhu, an associate professor in the School of Education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, said that “multiple measures” were being taken by the ministry to “ensure the quality of doctoral education”.

Dr Zhu, who has researched graduate education in China, emphasised that the proportions of students enrolled on academic doctoral degrees versus professional doctoral degrees stood currently at 87 per cent and 13 per cent, and “the quality of professional degree graduate education shall be of critical concern, as the new growing number of students will be mainly professional degree graduate students”.

The Ministry of Education has said that China will expand professional master’s degrees until they represent about two-thirds of the total taught postgraduate cohort, while also “significantly” increasing the number of university leavers with professional doctorates.

“With the adjustment of professional degree requirements in the Degree Law [from January 2025], colleges and universities urgently need to formulate university-level guidelines that can meet the quality assurance requirements for professional degree education,” Dr Zhu said.

“As there are a variety of disciplines involved in this process – for example, engineering, law and education – [drafting] guidelines that can properly reflect the unique disciplinary characteristics in professional graduate students’ training can be a challenging task.”

karen.liu@timeshighereducation.com