270 MILLION CHINESE ATTAINED HIGHER EDUCATION

BEIJING, SEPTEMBER 23 /SRNA/ - China now has 270 million people with higher education, Deputy Minister of Education Wang Guangyan said.

At a press conference, Wang said that the preschool enrolment rate had reached 92.9 percent, while the retention rate in compulsory education stood at 96.1 percent.

According to him, the enrolment rate in upper secondary education had reached 92 percent, Xinhua reported.

Guo Peng, head of the Development Planning Department at the Ministry of Education, said that universities, under the Double First-Class Initiative, would expand undergraduate enrolment by 76,000 places between 2027 and 2030.

The initiative supports selected universities and academic disciplines with the aim of achieving world-class status.

Guo said there would not simply be an increase in the number of enrolled students, but that efforts would also be made to improve the structure and quality of higher education.

He added that universities would adjust academic programmes to better align with national priorities, with greater support for emerging fields such as artificial intelligence, integrated circuits, biomedicine and new energy.

Guo said that China's higher education enrolment rate reached 61.3 percent in 2025, with a total of 48.73 million students enrolled.