How do we prove that a PhD is “qualified”? In China, the answer is increasingly tilted toward administrative authority, relying on a rigorous system of state-led audits to safeguard minimum quality standards. In the United States, by contrast, the answer is embedded within the internal reputation mechanisms of the academic community, relying on an “invisible hand” of peer evaluation and market selection.
Alex Shieh, a Chinese-American student journalist, recently testified before the House of Representatives, revealing a truth uncovered through big data mining: the skyrocketing tuition is not primarily being used to enhance the quality of instruction, but is instead being poured into an increasingly bloated, bureaucratized, and opaque administrative machine.
A wave of educational expansion intended to break the ossification of society has, more than two decades later, revealed complex consequences. The widespread possession of university degrees has not eliminated the influence of family background; instead, it has enabled advantaged resources to continue their intergenerational transmission in more sophisticated and resilient ways. An empirical study based on long-term survey data uncovers the complex truth behind this grand social experiment in China
“Not having a job has been my lifelong dream. I never expected that this dream would actually come true. Today, I officially quit—without a backup plan,” she said calmly in the video. Her voice was soft but carried a quiet resolve. “Life is not a track. It’s a wilderness.”
In China, about 30% of academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering hold university presidencies or other high-level administrative posts. In contrast, among Western Nobel Prize winners in the sciences, that proportion is under 5%.
The presidents of China’s top 39 national universities are almost exclusively from a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) background, whereas two-thirds of the presidents among the US News Top 50 universities graduated from humanities and social sciences fields.
In the first half of 2025, Nature Communications published around 5,400 papers, about 2,100 of them from Chinese authors—roughly 39%, the highest share globally. Based on standard pricing, Chinese research funding contributed a rough estimate of USD $14.7 million to this journal in six months—equivalent to the cost of two medium-sized scientific research vessels.
On July 20, 2022, a seemingly unremarkable document was released in Brussels. The Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment was jointly signed by dozens of European research funding agencies, research institutes, national evaluation bodies, and scholarly organizations.
Today, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE) simultaneously released on their official websites the list of newly elected academicians for 2025: 73 added to CAS and 71 to CAE, 144 in total.
With the increasing demand for globalized education, how to shorten the time and cost of studying abroad while ensuring teaching quality and enhancing the value of degrees has become a core focus for many universities and students. In November 2025, through our efforts, a university in Jiangsu, China, which emphasizes the training of applied talents, reached an agreement with a high-ranking public university in Illinois, USA, to implement a “3+1+1” combined undergraduate and master’s program.
