Since the beginning of the reform and opening up policy, China’s scale of higher
education in numbers of students admitted and college graduates kept increasing.
However the increase in the 1980s and most of 1990s was modest, especially
compared to that in 1999 and thereafter. In 1999, Chinese government made a
strategic decision to enlarge the scale of higher education. As a result, the number of
new students admitted to college increased by over 40% from 1998 to 1999. The
expansion continued in subsequent years.