Higher education has expanded during the twentieth century and is continuing to do so, both in the OECD area and worldwide. In 1900, there were about 500,000 higher education students worldwide, representing about 1% of the school-leaver age cohort (Schofer and Meyer 2005). In 2015, there were about 250 million students in the world. Most of the expansion happened after 1960, first in the OECD area, then in non-OECD countries, but the trend is still ongoing in most OECD countries. In 2014, based on recent graduation trends, on average 36% of young people across OECD countries were expected to graduate from tertiary education at least once before the age of 30 (OECD 2016).
These figures are a good illustration of the expansion of higher education: increasing numbers of people entering and graduating from higher education expanded higher education infrastructures to host them, but also, perhaps, brought a gradual change in the social norms (or expectation) about higher education...
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Vincent-Lancrin, S. (2020). Expansion of Higher Education, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Countries. In: Teixeira, P.N., Shin, J.C. (eds) The International Encyclopedia of Higher Education Systems and Institutions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8905-9_53
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