By the end of this decade, four out of every 10 of the world’s young graduates are going to come from just two countries – China and India. This is a significant shift in the balance of graduate numbers, with the rising Asian economies accelerating ahead of the United States and Western Europe.
According to projections from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), China alone will account for 29 percent of graduates in 2020, after quintupling its numbers in the last decade, while India will account for 12 and the United States for 11 percent.
If this trend continues, the number of 25- to 34-year-olds with a higher education degree from countries as diverse as Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, the Russian Federation, South Africa and in this region, most notably Saudi Arabia, will be almost 40 percent higher than the number from all OECD countries by the year 2020. Higher education is the mirror of economic performance and in the post-World War II era, universities in the US, Western Europe, Japan and Russia dominated. Now China and India are the biggest players. Their rise in graduate numbers reflects their changing ambitions: Wanting to compete against advanced economies for high-skill, high-income employment. Instead of offering low-cost manufacture, they are targeting the hi-tech professional jobs that have become the preserve of the Western middle classes.
As the OECD figures show, this is not simply a case of countries such as China expanding while others stand still. Across the industrialized world, graduate numbers are increasing, just not as quickly as those in China. By 2020, China’s young graduate population will be about the same as the total US population between the ages of 25 and 64. India will have the second largest share of the world’s graduates by 2020. To put the change in perspective, Brazil will have more graduates than Germany, Turkey more than Spain, and Indonesia three times more than France.
There are strong incentives for countries to expand higher education and create new jobs for the better-educated as unskilled manufacturing jobs disappear. Shifting from mass production to knowledge economy occupations means improved employment rates and earnings. While the OECD forecast reveals the pace of growth in graduate numbers, it does not predict whether there will be enough graduate jobs to go round. The ceiling for jobs in science and technology has not been reached and so individuals from increasingly better-educated populations will most likely continue to have good employment opportunities as long as economies continue to become more knowledge based.
Getting a college degree is also not always enough; much depends on what kind of degree it is. More than one-third of students who enroll in college get a Bachelor of Arts degree. A BSc is the next most common degree followed by BCom and BEd. Engineering, medicine and other technical courses lag far behind.
Still, by gradually shifting the focus from mass production jobs to knowledge-based work, the top developing nations have nearly caught up to developed nations in terms of college graduates, highlighting the strides emerging economies like China and India and other non-OECD nations have made in higher education over the past decade.