china's great academic leap forward
DESCRIPTION
China is either at or near the so-called Lewis turning point, where it is no longer hugely productive to shift workers from agriculture to manufacturing. Now, growth will need to come increasingly from so-called total factor productivity, which itself is driven by technology and innovation, as Cai Fang, vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, argues.TRANSCRIPT
6/3/2015 China's Great Academic Leap Forward - Bloomberg View
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-05-18/academic-bonds-strengthen-between-u-s-and-china 1/2
China is either at or near the socalled Lewis turning point, where it is no longer hugely productiveto shift workers from agriculture to manufacturing. Now, growth will need to come increasinglyfrom socalled total factor productivity, which itself is driven by technology and innovation, as CaiFang, vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, argues.
China has been busy preparing for the change. During the past two decades, Chinese involvementin international science and engineering has drastically increased, new research from economistsRichard Freeman and Wei Huang of Harvard University shows. In 1970, after the CulturalRevolution, the country had fewer than 50,000 undergraduate students and almost no graduatestudents, but this changed quickly in the 1990s and 2000s.
From 1970 to 2010, the number of students enrolled in higher education globally rose by 500percent, to 178 million from 29 million. Nowhere was this growth faster than in China. While inthe U.S. the number increased 140 percent, in China, it rose almost 30,000 percent, and the countrymore than doubled its number of colleges. Of global total enrollment, China’s share expandedfrom nothing to 17 percent. For comparison, India’s share rose from 9 percent to 12 percent duringthe same period.
It’s true that the quality of that education is still not topnotch. No Chinese universities are rankedwithin the top 100 institutions globally, according to the Shanghai Academic Ranking of WorldUniversities. The government is investing heavily in improving quality, however, and there arenow six Chinese universities in the top 200, up from none in 2003.
CHINA
China's Great Academic LeapForward
By Peter R. Orszag
MAY 18, 2015 9:13 AM EDT
a A
6/3/2015 China's Great Academic Leap Forward - Bloomberg View
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-05-18/academic-bonds-strengthen-between-u-s-and-china 2/2
Furthermore, the Chinese have invested in research links globally, and especially with the U.S. In1993, China endorsed education abroad; more than a decade later, it began to subsidize largenumbers of outbound students. As recently as 2005, roughly 60,000 mainland Chinese came to theU.S. for higher ed; by 2012, there were almost 240,000. Mainland Chinese represent more than aquarter of international students in the U.S.
These relationships also extend to research. China has become the top international collaboratorfor U.S. researchers. And by 2012, almost half of Chinese collaborations abroad were withAmericans, Freeman and Huang have found.
They conclude that China’s new links to global research, and in particular its key relationship withthe U.S., have “allowed China to reach the scientific and technological frontier much faster than ifit had done a more parochial path.” And that in turn is crucial to continued strong growth in China.(I’ll be spending the next few days there, as the Lewis turning point comes and goes.) Despite therising tension between the U.S. and China over the South China Sea islands, academic researchprovides one dimension along which the two countries remain deeply codependent.
To contact the author on this story:Peter Orszag at [email protected]
To contact the editor on this story:Mary Duenwald at [email protected]