Higher Education and the Global Brain Drain

Global tertiary (higher) education enrollment has expanded enormously since the mid-twentieth century, a trend UNESCO terms "massification": the global gross tertiary enrollment ratio rose from under 10% in 1970 to roughly 40% by the early 2020s according to UIS data, driven especially by rapid expansion in East Asia — China's tertiary gross enrollment ratio alone rose from around 3.4% in 1990 to over 60% by the early 2020s, according to Chinese Ministry of Education and World Bank figures, reflecting a deliberate state expansion of university capacity beginning with the 1999 higher-education enrollment expansion policy. This expansion has been highly uneven, however: Sub-Saharan Africa's tertiary gross enrollment ratio remains below 10% in many countries, and low-income countries as a group still enroll a small fraction of the tertiary-age population that high-income countries do, a gap that compounds the disparities already documented at the primary and secondary levels and that limits the domestic supply of the scientists, engineers, doctors, and administrators such countries need for their own development.