Higher education in China

In 2023, the university enrollment rate in the People's Republic of China was 60.2% according to country's Ministry of Education, representing 47 million mainland Chinese students enrolled in 4-year university and college degree programs in some 3,074 Chinese tertiary institutions. Entry into universities is intended to be meritocratic, depending only on the result of the Gaokao entrance examination. Entry is not influenced or determined by sporting activities, extracurricular programs, donations, or alumni parents and siblings. Chinese education authorities have emphasized meritocracy as a social equalizer. Usually, 12 years of formal education is the one prerequisite for entry into an undergraduate degree.

Near the end of the twentieth century, the Chinese government attempted numerous reform measures aimed at strengthening higher education in China; these included Project 211 and Project 985. Later, in 2014, the General Office of the Chinese Communist Party and State Council of the People's Republic of China issued guidance on strengthening ideological education in colleges and universities. In 2015, a tertiary education development initiative called Double First-Class Construction designed by the central government of the People's Republic of China was launched. It aims to comprehensively develop elite Chinese universities into world-class institutions by improving their faculty departments to world-class level by the end of 2050. The full list of the plan was published in September 2017; it 140 universities being approved as the Double First-Class Universities, representing the top 5% of the total 3,012 universities and colleges in China.