By the end of this decade, four out of every Kinesthetic learner characteristics professionals in the world will be from only two countries – China and India. Economic growth in Asian countries will also change the balance of higher education graduates. In the next eight years, China and India are expected to lead the way in training students.
Studies by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) show far-reaching changes in the balance of number of graduates, and growing Asian economies should bypass the United States and Western Europe.
Projections of the kind that the “global talent bank” will have in 2020 show that China will continue to increase the number of its graduates – up to 29% of the world’s 25-34 year olds. The U.S. will lose the most – decline to 11% – the country for the first time will take third place and will be after India.
The U.S. and European Union countries together are expected to have slightly more than a quarter of the world’s young graduates. Russia will also reduce its indicators – its share of graduates in the world will almost halve since the beginning of the century. Indonesia, according to forecasts of the OECD, will rise to fifth place (on the photo – students from Indonesia).
Is this the end of the empire? Higher education has gre vocabulary list become a mirror and a magnifying glass of economic activity. In the period after World War II, universities in the United States, Western Europe, Japan and Russia dominated. The USA, in particular, was a superstate for universities – in understanding their wealth, influence, and, until recently, the number of statistical indicators. Until 2000, the U.S. had a particle of young professionals relative to China. Japan also had many young specialists, as did India.
Today, China and India are the biggest players in the industry. The increase in the number of graduates reflects a change in the ambitions of these countries – now they want to compete with developed economies for high-income jobs. Instead of developing low-cost industries, they aim to attract high-tech jobs that the Western middle class had previously reserved for them.
Fivefold growth
As OECD data show, this is not only the case of countries such as China, whose economy is expanding while others are standing still. In all industrialized countries, the number of graduates is growing – just not as fast as in China, where their number has increased five times in a decade. OECD notes that by 2020, the number of young graduates from China will be approximately equal to the total population of the U.S. population aged 25 to 64 years. On this altered world map, we will see that Brazil will have more graduates than Germany, Turkey more than Spain, Indonesia three times more than France. In the UK, the opposite trend is observed, the country is projected to increase its particle size from 3% in 2010 to 4% in 2020. This drive to increase the number of graduates has clear economic goals, according to the OECD study.
Will there be enough jobs?
The transition from “mass production to the knowledge economy” means better employment and income – so there are “strong incentives” for countries to expand higher education. But will there be enough jobs for graduates with higher education? The OECD has tried to analyze the situation by looking at one side of the labor market: the number of jobs in science and technology. The number of such jobs has grown rapidly – and the report says that this is an example of how expanding higher education can create new types of employment.
These S&T jobs – for specialists and technicians – account for about every four out of 10 jobs in some Scandinavian and Nordic countries. By contrast, and this is an indicator of the older economy, these technological jobs represent only a small proportion of the workforce in China and India.
The OECD believes that there are significant economic benefits to investing in higher education – this creates new jobs for the more educated, while unskilled jobs disappear.