Huge progress on widening HE access globally since 2000
The number of students in higher education worldwide has increased by 161% since 2000, a far greater rate of increase than the 30% rise seen in primary and secondary school, according to UNESCO’s 2026 Global Education Monitoring (GEM) report released on 25 March.
Between 2000 and 2004, the number of students in tertiary education rose from 103 million to 269 million.
Among the countries that have notably increased the number of their university students are Chile, which has increased its number of people aged 25 to 35 with tertiary education to nearly 34%; Fiji, approximately 38%; Saudi Arabia, 46% and China, 50%.
Countries with the highest levels of post-secondary completion rates are Singapore, South Korea and Canada, all clustered around 80%.
The increases in Chile, Fiji, Saudi Arabia and China are even more impressive when cast in the tertiary gross enrolment ratio (GER) – the number of students enrolled in tertiary education divided by the population of a five-year age group after secondary school graduation.
According to this measure, Chile recorded a rise from 25% to 110%, Fiji a rise from 14% in 2005 to 75%, and Saudi Arabia saw an increase from 28% to 78%. The starkest rise came in China’s where GER numbers rocketed from 7% in 1999 to 77% in 2025.
Surveying the worldwide state of higher education, UNESCO states: “Post-secondary education has shifted from a privilege for the elite to mass participation.
“Policies have focused on reducing financial constraints and diversifying provision, as well as steering, rather than controlling, the system, with more institutional autonomy, quality assurance and cost sharing.”
However, equity challenges remain, UNESCO noted.
“Institutional hierarchies” still determine students’ access to and return from programmes. Challenges also exist within institutions and households, UNESCO said.
Financial pressures, caring responsibilities, mental health, institutional cultures and the language of instruction shape who progresses and who benefits fully from their studies, UNESCO said.
“Overall, equitable expansion depends less on any single policy than on coherent combinations of demand- and supply-side measures, underpinned by quality assurance, flexible pathways and evaluation of who benefits,” UNESCO noted.
The news was less positive for pre-tertiary education.
Since 2000 some 327 million more students attended primary and secondary schools than had at the start of this millennium, bringing the total to 1.4 billion. In addition, 45% more pre-schoolers attended pre-school.
But against that UNESCO sounded the alarm that last year was the seventh consecutive year that the number of children out of school rose; the figure now stands at 273 million, 60 million greater than the population of Brazil.
“[P]rogress in keeping children in school has slowed across every region since 2015, with a sharp decelerating in sub-Saharan Africa, mostly due to population growth,” the press release stated that accompanied the release of the GEM report.
UNESCO also pointed to the Middle East, “where ongoing regional tensions have forced many schools to close, leaving millions of children out of the classroom and at heightened risk of falling behind.”
Graduation rates cause concern
While the increases in university enrolment are impressive, Noah W Sobe, UNESCO’s Chief of Section for Higher Education sounded a note of caution.
“One of the higher education stories coming out of this report is that access is not a sufficient measure. Over the past 25 years we have seen increases in graduation rates, but it's only about 10%,” he told University World News.
“When you look at higher rates in Europe and North America and that Asia has almost caught up, the lower completion rate in sub-Saharan Africa stands out.
“We need better measures and the ability to look at attainment among age groups to give a more consistent picture,” he said, before pointing to Chile’s anomalous situation.
In the 1980s, Chile reformed its higher education system modelling the changes on the United States’s market-driven model.
These reforms include a system of large-scale student loans, which provided the capital for the growth of the sector from 16 state and 9 private universities to 35 independent private universities, 43 professional institutes and 54 technical train centres.
But it came at the cost of saddling students with high debts. Further, according to UNESCO, the system stratified, with students from wealthy families being disproportionately represented in elite universities.
“In 2016,” says Sobe, “that system was replaced with one that provides free tuition targeted to students from the 60% of households with the lowest income, which has been instrumental in increasing access as the GEM reports.”
Yet GEM notes, admissions practices continue to stratify Chile’s university students “with students from low-income and first-generation backgrounds [being] more likely to enrol in less-selective institutions and non-university institutions, including technical programs” – students at the low end of the economic spectrum are overrepresented in elite schools.
Importantly, GEM notes, “enrolment does not always translate into graduation and attainment of a tertiary qualification”.
Fourteen per cent of first-year undergraduates drop out. A similar percent of new students complete their degree within the programme’s three or four-year cycle.
“Some 38% graduate a year late and 60% graduate within three years after the expected time frame,” wrote UNESCO.
Fiji’s reforms and support package work
With a population of 937,300, Fiji is by far the smallest of 35 nations profiled in the GEM report. Along with 12 Pacific Island countries, including the Cook, Marshall and Solomon islands, Samoa, Tuvalu and Vanuatu, Fiji (made up of 110 inhabited islands) founded the University of the South Pacific (USP, Suvla, Fiji) in 1968.
In 2004, Arya Pratinidhi Sabha of Fiji, a private Hindu organisation founded the University of Fiji (Laukota, Fiji) and a year later the Fiji School of Medicine and Fiji Institute of Technology combined to form Fiji National University (with 14 campuses in Fiji). Together, the three universities enrol approximately 55,000 students, 58% of whom are Fijians.
The marked increase of Fijians attending university can be credited, Sobe says, “to an area of financial support measures for local students, grants, income contingent grants, loans and merit-based awards.”
This makes Fiji one of the exemplary cases that the GEM research showed and which several of the speakers at that launch underscored.
“No single reform will work. You need a combination of reforms and measures, instruments adjusted to the local context,” as Sobe put it.
Fiji’s government subsidises the cost of students at a rate of 70%. Among Fiji’s initiatives is the merit-based National Toppers Scholarship for STEM fields such as engineering and information that covers full tuition as well as living costs whether the student studies in Fiji or abroad.
The Tertiary Education Loans Scheme provides loans for tuition and living expenses – but, crucially, caps repayment at 20% of an individual’s gross income after graduation. Some 70% of high school graduates go on to university.
Fiji’s universities have turned to digital delivery to shrink the reality of, to borrow an Australian term, “the tyranny of distance” amongst the islands, with USP establishing its own satellite network. Still, UNESCO wrote, the “remoteness of the many islands, coupled with the high cost of internet and telephone infrastructure” continues to be a limiting factor”.
Access for underserved areas
Saudi Arabia’s immense oil wealth has allowed it to grow its higher education infrastructure from eight universities a decade ago to 70 public and private universities today, His Excellency, Saad Alghamdi, Deputy Minister of Planning of Saudi Arabia said at the launch of the GEM report streamed live from UNESCO headquarters in Paris.
Among these institutions, UNESCO notes, are seven universities in underserved areas of the country, community colleges (including a branch of Niagara College whose home is Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada) and women’s colleges. In 2023, 42% of Saudi Arabia’s education budget of 189 Saudi Riyals (US$50 billion USD) was allocated to higher, technical and vocational education.
Of Saudi Arabia’s population of 35 million, 44% are non-Saudi guest workers and their families. According to Al Jazeera, 2.5 million are from Bangladesh, 2.3 million are from India, 2.2 million from Pakistan, 2.2 million from Yemen, 1.8 million from Egypt and 1 million from Sudan.
While university education is free for guest workers as it is for Saudis, a significantly lower percentage of non-Saudi’s complete university studies. Accordingly, the national total of 46% attaining a tertiary degree can be disaggregated to “65% of Saudi nationals and 35% of non-Saudis,” stated UNESCO.
Alghamdi took great pride in telling those assembled to watch the GEM report’s launch that King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals had recently achieved the rank of 67th best university in the world.
He also singled out two internationalisation programs and how they relate to access to higher education.
The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Scholarship Programme (CTHMSP) funds 50,000 students to study at leading universities around the world.
According to the programme’s website, in 2022, the CTHMSP was restructured to better align with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, ensuring that scholarships contribute directly to economic development and national priorities.
“With a focus on high-demand fields and emerging industries, the programme aims to build a generation equipped with the knowledge and skills to compete globally, drive the Kingdom’s transformation, and strengthen its global position.”
The other programme reverses the flow of students from Saudi Arabia to its universities.
“The Kingdom,” Alghamdi said, “is working on attracting students from outside the country through a platform to study in Saudi Arabia” and that a quarter million students have applied to this platform in order to obtain scholarships to be able to pursue their studies in the kingdom.”
The gender gap between males and females in higher education that in 2006 was 20% – that is, with 20% more women than men in tertiary education has narrowed as male student participation rates have risen to close to 80%.
As in many other countries, male/female ratios in different fields are stratified, with almost 40% of male students studying business administration as against around 20% of female students and the percentage of males studying engineering being more than twice that of female students, for example.
This last gap, however, may soon close as “Female enrolment at the Saudi Electronic University, the first to provide higher education through a blended learning model, nearly doubled between 2018/19 and 2023 and 2024,” noted UNESCO.
The GEM report necessarily is heavy on numbers and, since it deals with both national and international trends, but counter this, UNESCO included eight individual stories that are thematic of the general trends the statistics show. Thus, these stories put a human face on what otherwise could seem rather abstract.
The GEM report’s case study of Saudi Arabia is told by Ghala Alsalem, a female student studying software engineering at Prince Sultan University.
Not only does Saudi Arabia strongly encourage higher education, she wrote, so does her family: “Almost all women in my family have pursued higher education, including bachelor’s degrees, masters and PhD degrees.”
Without getting into details, Alsalem sketches the history of women and her major. “Ten years ago, there weren’t any engineering programmes in Saudi Arabia [for women]. Now, Princess Nourah University, the world’s biggest women’s university, has, I think, five or six engineering degrees.”
Similarly, without getting into the details of women’s history in Saudi Arabia or the changes that have recently occurred, such as the lifting eight years ago of the ban that prevented women from driving alone, Alsalem speaks to what she sees as women’s place in her country and their ability to control their own lives.
“Many women,” she continues “see as a way to contribute to Saudi Arabia and as a pathway for their own independence. . . and for their own long-term security,” she wrote.
Massification ‘not conformity’ in China
HE Huai Jinpeng, Minister of Education of China, told the GEM report launch, that to respond to people’s demand for higher education, in the past 30 years, the number of higher education institutions grew from more than 1,000 to 3,000 and the number of university students has grown from 3.6 million to 48 million (a million more than the population of Algeria).
“Massification,” as the GEM report calls it: “did not mean uniformity; rather, there was a deliberate strategy to expand through diversification and stratification. In 2023, enrolment was shared between regular undergraduate (34%), vocational (29%), adult (17%), web-based (13%) and postgraduate programmes (7%)”.
Funding does not flow from Beijing. As early as 1998, ie, at the start of China's “Unmatched Expansion” of higher education, as UNESCO subtitles the case study on China, Beijing reversed the no tuition policy and started reducing its financial contribution, which by 2006 has dropped almost by half, to 34%. In 2015, this share was doubled to 38% while the government capped tuition fees.
China’s higher education sector is stratified between top-tier universities, most of which are in Beijing or Shanghai, and other institutions in other part of the country; according to in 2008 the Ministry of Education approved 58 new universities and colleges, most of which are vocational, and “two thirds of which are located in central and western regions.”
In 2005, China’s top-tier universities enrolled only 200,000 more students, 1.6 million vs. 1.4 million, than they had in 1997. The Double First-Class University Plan established in 2015, eventually included 150 universities around the country.
“After 2016, these institutions trained more than 50% of master’s degree holders in the country, 80% of doctoral degree holders, and 90% of degree holders in the fields prioritized by the plan,” wrote UNESCO; the plan’s website says that fields include include “59 basic disciplines such as mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology, as well as 180 engineering disciplines and 92 philosophy and social science disciplines”.
While the number of these universities under Beijing’s direct oversight fell from 114 to 75 between 2012 and 2021, notes UNESCO, Beijing’s financial support doubled to $179 USD.
China’s 28 financial support programmes
China has 28 national programmes to support students in financial difficulty that, according to UNESCO, “increase students’ time for study and [their academic] performance.”
In 2023, these programs distributed ¥185 billion (US$27 billion USD). The central and provincial governments provided half of this money while banks, universities and social organisations provided the other half.
Still, UNESCO notes, “households with members in higher education spent 32% of their total disposable income on it [higher education].”
In an effort to deal with this affordability crisis, in 2024, Beijing changed the scholarship regimen so that it would support double the number of students.
China’s famed Gaokao, the national university entrance exam, is taken by about 10 million students per year. And, while its pass rate has increased from 20% to 90% in 2020, UNESCO notes, “access to top-tier universities remains inequitable.”
Between 2006 and 2013 students who grew up in Beijing “were 30 times more likely to enter the prestigious Tsinghua University (Beijing) than their peers from neighbouring Henan province,” wrote UNESCO.
Pointing to China’s forecast demographic decline, UNESCO wrote: “many institutions will have to deal with pressures to close or merge”.
The story UNESCO chose to exemplify the ethos of Chinese higher education was written by Liu Yanjing, who grew up in a poor part of Shaanxi Province in central China. Her primary and secondary schooling took place in substandard classrooms and, while her teachers were dedicated, she lacked extracurricular tutoring.
What changed her life was the National Special Admissions Program (NSAP), which set aside seats for students from “regions facing long-standing structural disadvantages, including both rural villages and small towns” as well as a separate admissions system.
“Admission,” she wrote, “is still based on the gaokao exam results, but this adjusted evaluation process significantly improves our chances of entering good universities and competitive majors.”
Yanjing wrote about how the NSAP gave her the confidence that there was a pathway to higher education for a young woman like her.
Speaking more broadly, she then wrote: “My own experience shows that targeted public policy can make a real difference. The NSAP has opened doors that once seemed closed to students from less-resourced regions.
“It demonstrates that with thoughtful institutional design, talent from poor areas can reach China’s most prestigious universities, and begin to reshape, not only individual lives, but also broader patterns of education inequality.”