China’s rocketing PhD output could burn its jobseekers

China is increasing its production of doctoral graduates at a startling rate.

The country admitted 153,275 PhD students in 2023 and 171,114 in 2024. In 2025, the figure rose to 201,600 – an increase of about one-third in just two years. And by the end of 2025, 753,600 doctoral students were enrolled, with 112,900 doctoral degrees awarded.

This expansion is not occurring in isolation. In January 2024, the State Council Academic Degrees Committee launched a new round of reviews to expand the number of institutions and programmes authorised to award postgraduate degrees, explicitly linking graduate education with national strategic and economic development priorities.

The ambition is clear: to build a larger pool of highly trained researchers capable of supporting China’s scientific, technological and economic transformation. The question is whether the research economy is growing fast enough to employ them.

It certainly seems clear that higher education itself is not expanding fast enough to employ them all. Among the 75,200 people who graduated from doctoral programmes in 2023, fewer than 40 per cent had entered universities or research institutions by the end of August, according to Ministry of Education figures.

The alternative is not necessarily mass unemployment among PhD holders. Although unemployment among bachelor’s degree graduates has risen sharply in recent years, doctoral graduates are still likely to be able to find positions somewhere. But establishing a stable career may be much harder than it used to be. If job opportunities do not grow at the same pace as doctoral training, the result could be fiercer competition for academic jobs, longer postdoctoral careers, greater reliance on fixed-term contracts and, ultimately, a harder and longer route into permanent research positions.

Japan offers a cautionary tale in that regard. In the 1990s, concerned about falling behind the US and Europe in science and technology, it set a target of supporting 10,000 postdoctoral researchers under its First Science and Technology Basic Plan (1996-2000). The target was achieved but career opportunities did not expand at the same pace, and Japanese economic growth continued to flatline throughout the 2010s.

Japan’s 2025 Science, Technology and Innovation White Paper acknowledged that support for researchers’ subsequent career paths was insufficient, while the growth of fixed-term employment heightened uncertainty among young researchers.

The UK offers a different lesson. Even with a mature and internationally competitive research system, academic employment remains heavily dependent on fixed-term contracts. Figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency reveal that less than 30 per cent of academic staff were on such contracts in 2024-25, rising to 43 per cent among part-time staff. And research-only careers are particularly precarious: fewer than one-third of research-only staff held permanent contracts.

Meanwhile, 70.1 per cent of UK PhD holders had left academia three and a half years after graduation – yet more than half of those outside academia remained in research roles. Indeed, just a year after completing their degrees, only four in 10 UK PhD graduates from 2022-23 remained in academia, according to the Careers Research and Advisory Centre’s Vitae programme. Nevertheless, its 2026 What do researchers do? report concludes that PhD graduates “continue to be highly employable”, with less than 3 per cent unemployed and 91 per cent working.

The lesson is that leaving academia does not necessarily mean leaving research. A healthy research economy needs diverse and sustainable pathways across universities, public laboratories and industry.

For China, then, the question is consequently not simply how many PhDs it can produce but how many research-intensive careers its economy can sustain – particularly amid the post-pandemic slowdown that has been evident for several years as the economy shifts from export-led growth towards greater reliance on domestic demand.

According to the latest ministry figures, more than one-fifth of 2023 doctoral graduates joined enterprises. That is a good start. But China will need to expand that number severalfold if it wants its profusion of doctoral graduates to continue to be an economic asset rather than a structural problem, with too many highly trained researchers competing for too few stable careers.

Grace W. F. Chau is an educator, writer and independent researcher whose work focuses on Chinese migration and politics. She is an affiliate in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow.