Is there more doctors in China than donkeys at night?

Recently, the PhD candidate encountered an unexpected competitor. It’s not AI, not a master’s degree holder, and not a reviewer either.

It's a donkey.

An article titled “There Are More Chinese PhDs Than Donkeys” has gone viral on social media. The core number is,In 2025, there will be about 1.2 million doctors in China, and the stock of donkeys will fall below 1.2 million [1].

The doctors didn't think they were dead and lost to a donkey in scarcity. If Avanti was born in the future, he might not be riding a donkey, but an old doctor.

Although the article is just a joke, it also points out an indisputable fact: there are more and more doctors in China.

Although China has long had"Doctor Buy Donkey"The allusion, but this" doctor "is not the" doctor ". The implementation time of the doctoral training system in the modern sense is actually very short. If it is counted from 1983 when the doctoral degree was first promulgated [2], it is only more than 40 years ago.

The first round of rapid expansion in the number of PhDs occurred from the late 1990 s to around 2005, which was part of the expansion of China's higher education. Since 1999, undergraduate education has gradually become popular, and the scale of postgraduate training has also expanded.

In 1997, China enrolled only more than 10,000 doctors and graduated only more than 7,000 [3]. By 2005, the number of students enrolled and graduated had quadrupled [4].

After 2006, China required appropriate control of higher education enrollment growth, so the number of doctoral students entered a relatively flat period.

In 2006, 56000 doctoral students were enrolled and the number of graduates 36200 [5]; By 2017, 11 years later, the number of students enrolled and graduated will only increase by about 1.5 times that of 2006 [6].

In 2017, due to the needs of economic and social development and national strategy during the 13th Five-Year Plan period, the scale of doctoral enrollment expanded again [7].In 2025, there will be more than 200000 doctoral students enrolled and more than 110000 doctoral graduates [8].

This round of enrollment expansion is more about science, technology, agriculture, medicine, basic disciplines andEmerging Interdisciplinary[9]. In 2022, students in engineering, science and medicine will account for nearly 3/4 of all doctoral students [10].

Professional doctorates focus on solving practical engineering or management problems

By the end of 2025,The cumulative number of doctoral degrees in China is close to 1.48 million, a size comparable to the population of Kyoto, Japan.If you take into account the number of people who have obtained doctorates overseas, the total will be even higher.

People think that "doctors are becoming more and more common" is not entirely an illusion. At present, the number of doctors is indeed increasing on a large scale.

If you only look at the absolute number, China is indeed one of the largest doctoral training countries in the world. However, in terms of the proportion of population, the number of PhDs in China is not large.

Before discussing the number of doctors, we must first clarify a question: What exactly does "the number of doctors" mean?

There are three main types of statistics related to the number of doctors: the number of doctoral students enrolled, the number of doctoral students enrolled, and the number of doctoral graduates.

It doesn't matter if you can't tell these names, just remember one thing:Recruiting a doctoral student does not mean that a doctoral student will graduate in a few years.

Because the training process for doctors is longer than that for undergraduates and masters, and the screening is more rigorous. Enrollment does not mean that you can graduate smoothly, and you may also experience postponement, diversion or even withdrawal in the middle.

In 2019, there were about 7900 doctoral students nationwide.Diversion Exit, accounting for 2% of the doctoral students in the school that year; Of the 424000 doctoral students in the school, 1/3 are in a deferred state [11][12].

The same is the cultivation,A donkey can be put on the market in about two years, and a doctor's degree may be postponed to six to eight years. [13].In terms of training efficiency, the donkey won the doctor again.

If you have seen the American TV series "The Big Bang Theory", you will remember that Sheldon, Leonard and Raj are all doctors. Amy and Bernadette who joined later are also doctors. The only two academic depressions among a group of good friends are Howard, who has a master's degree, and Penny, who works in a restaurant.

There are about 4.5 million doctorate winners in the United States, "The Big Bang Theory" stills.

Although TV dramas cannot fully represent reality, just looking at the data, the proportion of PhDs in the United States is indeed much higher than that in China. According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, in 2020, only 0.12 per cent of China's population aged 25 and over will have a PhD or equivalent education, compared with 2.09 per cent in the United States, 1.51 per cent in Germany and 1.08 per cent in the United Kingdom [14].

Visually imagine that 100000 is almost the population of a small county, of which there are only about 120 people with doctoral education.In the vast sea of people, you want to meet a doctor randomly on the street. The probability is as rare as SSR card.

Diluted by the huge population, there are also scientific research teams. China has about 1585 R & D personnel for every 1 million people, while South Korea has 8714, Sweden has 7930 and Denmark has 7692. China's share is less than South Korea's 1/5 [15].

Then why do we still feel that there are more and more doctors around us?

An important reason is that doctors are clustered in a small number of universities and research institutions in densely populated areas. In 2024, there will be about 680000 doctoral students in the country, of which 162000 will be in Beijing alone, accounting for nearly 1/4. In addition to Shanghai and Jiangsu, the three provinces and cities have a total of about 40% of the country's doctoral students [16].

Therefore, if you are in a first-tier city or work in knowledge-intensive fields such as scientific research institutes and high-tech enterprises, what you see is the group of doctors who have been screened by geography and occupation.

It's like you're more likely to see donkeys in traditional donkey-raising areas such as Inner Mongolia and Liaoning than in Beijing and Shanghai [17] because local density masks the truth of scarcity.

After the number of doctors becomes more, it is inevitable to face a more realistic problem: where to work after graduation?

In the past, university faculty was almost the default career path for doctors, and everyone naturally entered universities or research institutes after graduation.

As the number of PhDs expanded, the road became more and more crowded. After 2010, the number of new college teachers was frequently lower than the number of doctoral graduates in the previous year [18].

The Change Trend of the Number of Doctoral Graduates and New Special Teachers in Colleges and Universities from 2003 to 2022 [18] Liu Baocun, & You Lu Ying. (2025)

More and more doctors choose to do it first.Postdoctoral researcherAccumulate scientific research results and use them to increase the "bargaining chip" in finding teaching positions.The post-doctoral program was originally set to further enhance the transitional stage of scientific research ability, but now it is more like the waiting room before entering the university.In 2025, there will be about 135000 postdoctoral students in China [19].

Don't want to queue up for university faculty, there are also doctors who choose to turn around and go to the enterprise. In 2023, more than 1/5 of the country's 75200 fresh doctoral graduates entered corporate employment, and this proportion has increased for three consecutive years [20].

This choice is not difficult to understand, scientific research with great uncertainty. Donkey grinding for three years, but also grinding a lot of solid white flour; Dr. "grinding" for three years, the end may only save a few reviewers rejected to pieces of paper. To work in the enterprise, at least can get a certainty and good salary.

When there are more and more doctors, "is it worth reading" becomes a difficult question to answer.

On average, graduate education can bring about a 24.6 percent income advantage. But not the higher the degree, the greater the economic return.With the exception of individual disciplines, the economic profitability of postgraduate education is generally higher than that of doctoral education [21].

The investment return risk of a doctoral education is also slightly higher than that of a master's [22]. It takes longer to read a Ph.D. and the opportunity cost is higher, but it is not so sure whether you can get an income that matches these inputs after graduation.

A few years of doctoral career means giving up the accumulated working years that could have been entered into the workplace, while also facing the possibility of instability.Mentor-student relationshipHeavy research pressure and strong psychological burden. For female doctors, the long cultivation cycle will also hit the fertility window.

The greater the pressure on scientific research, the more obvious the depression tendency of doctoral students [23]

Therefore, whether reading a blog is worth it or not can only be answered by each individual in it.

The good news is that Dr. and Donkey's business content is not vertical.

A donkey is covered in treasures: donkey meat can be burned and donkey skin can be boiled.Donkey-hide gelatin, live donkeys can pull mill;

A doctor is sick all over: the body is brittle, the mind is anxious, and the hair is sparse.

Students who are studying for a Ph.D. can do experiments at ease. At present, there is no need to worry that the Ph.D. will be used to replace donkeys.