Recently, the news that the number of master's and doctoral graduates in Beijing exceeded that of undergraduates for the first time this year has attracted the attention and discussion of netizens.
In fact, in recent years, the number of universities with doctoral programs in China has increased significantly. As of 2020, including military academies and scientific research institutions, there are 425 universities in China with doctoral degree authorization qualifications.
Distribution of doctors by province in China
The number of doctoral programs is an important yardstick to measure the comprehensive strength of universities, and its regional layout also reflects the spatial distribution pattern of high-quality higher education resources in mainland China to a certain extent.
The media sorted out the geographical distribution of existing universities with doctoral degree authorization and the characteristics of different doctoral degree authorization disciplines in different universities.
Figure 1. The top 15 provinces in terms of the number of doctoral and master's students in 2020
After adding a number of new doctoral authorized universities, the number of doctoral students enrolled in the mainland in 2022 reached 139,000, and the number of enrolled students reached 556,100, an increase of 166,600 over 2018.
Figure 2. Proportion of master's and doctoral training units in the top 15 provinces of GDP
From the perspective of provincial-level administrative regions, 31 provinces in the country have doctoral training units, and 19 provinces have more than 10 universities with doctoral programs. Among them, the top five are Beijing, Jiangsu, Shanghai, Liaoning and Shandong, which all have more than 20 doctoral programs. With its strong higher education resources, Beijing has 47 doctoral universities, ranking first in the country.
Figure 3. Top 15 provinces in terms of the number of doctoral universities
From a regional point of view, there are 164 doctoral degree authorized universities in the three regions of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta, accounting for 40% of the total number of doctoral degree authorized universities. Among the three provinces and one city in the Yangtze River Delta region, there are 74 universities with doctoral programs, including 27 in Jiangsu Province, 22 in Shanghai, 15 in Zhejiang Province and 10 in Anhui Province. There are 71 doctoral universities in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, including 47 in Beijing. There are 19 universities in Guangdong Province that have doctoral degree authorization qualifications.
Sichuan Province and Chongqing Municipality in the Sichuan-Chongqing Economic Circle have a total of 23 doctoral authorized universities. It is worth mentioning that the "three eastern provinces", which are traditional old industrial bases, have 48 doctoral universities, accounting for 12% of the national total.
It is not difficult to see that the regional distribution of doctoral points shows obvious imbalance, and there are large differences within regions.
Ranking of the number of doctors by province
At present, according to the distribution of doctoral and master's degree population, Beijing has the largest population of doctoral degrees, reaching 228,000, ranking first in the country.
About 134,000 people in Shanghai have doctorates, ranking second in the country.
As a major economic province, Jiangsu Province has 95,600 high-tech talents with doctoral degrees, ranking third in the country.
As the most populous province, Guangdong has 93,900 doctoral degrees, ranking fourth in absolute terms in the country.
Shandong Province is a major education province in China, with a strong Confucian ideology and a large population with doctoral degrees, about 71,400, ranking fifth in the country.
In addition, five provinces, including Hubei Province, Zhejiang Province, Sichuan Province, Shaanxi Province and Henan Province, ranked sixth to tenth in the country in terms of total number of doctoral degrees.
In terms of the proportion of the population with doctoral degrees, Beijing reached 1.04%, ranking first in the country. Beijing is the only province and city in China with a population with more than 1% of the PhD. degree. It can be seen that the proportion of high-tech talents in Beijing is quite high.
Shanghai's doctoral population accounts for 0.54%, and the number and proportion of doctoral degree population are the same as Beijing, ranking first in the country.