How many university students are there in the world

On this page Higher education institutions Student numbers Staff numbers Student satisfaction Widening participation Applicants and acceptances Working with business and industry Income and expenditure Graduate employment Economic impact Research. Key facts and figures about UK higher education. Higher education institutions. Student numbers. In —19, there were 2. Undergraduate: 1. Staff numbers. Student satisfaction. Widening participation. By providing your email, you agree to the Quartz Privacy Policy.

Skip to navigation Skip to content. Discover Membership. Editions Quartz. More from Quartz About Quartz. Follow Quartz. These are some of our most ambitious editorial projects. From our Obsession. This chart shows the rise of the gross enrollment ratio in tertiary education across world regions. A corresponding map showing the share of students arriving from abroad can be seen here.

In the past, there were very few higher education institutions since only a small fraction of the population was able to read or write. During this early period, centers of education mostly had a religious focus and trained clergy. In Western Europe these centers were monasteries, while in the Islamic world these were madrasas. The chart shows the increasing number of monasteries in Western Europe between the 6th and the 15th century. Between the end of the first millennium and the 13th century the number grew rapidly, before coming to a halt and declining.

As the rise of monasteries came to a halt a new form of a higher education institution evolved: the university. These secular institutions began to rise as monasteries slowly started to decline, and the religious powers lost their monopoly on higher education. Still, this was only the beginning; as late as the 18th century there were still fewer than universities in Western Europe. The raw data on monasteries and universities in Europe over the long-run published by Buringh and Van Zanden is available on a separate page.

The visualisations show estimations and projections from to of higher education by country. The numbers completing degrees is expected to increase around the world as advanced skills become more important in both developing and developed economies. For more information on how these projections are constructed, visit the projections of future education page here. Van Zanden, Jan Luiten.

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