Ten-Year Development Trajectory of Higher Education in China: Development Trend and Quality Path (2014–2024)

Based on 2014–2024 data from China’s Ministry of Education National Education Development Statistical Bulletin, this study explores the ten-year development trends and quality improvement paths of China’s higher education. It finds that the gross higher education enrollment rate rose from 37.5% to 60.8% over the decade, achieving a leap from popularization to accessibility, with significant growth in enrollment scale, institutional count, and resource investment. However, scale expansion has triggered quality challenges: fluctuating student-faculty ratios, imbalanced type structure, and lagging per capita resource growth. Enrollment growth has no significant linear correlation with full-time faculty growth, but a highly significant positive correlation with student-faculty ratio growth. The study proposes optimizing quality paths via a scale-quality linkage mechanism, faculty structure optimization, increased resource investment, and improved type structure, to provide empirical support and policy reference for China’s higher education transformation from scale-driven to connotation-based high-quality development.

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