China’s Population Decline Impacts its Education Sector

Students arrive for a ceremony on the first day of the new school year at an elementary school in Beijing, China on Sept. 1, 2021. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

China’s population has entered an era of negative growth, and the impact of plummeting birth rates has spread to the education sector.

The Asian giant may have seen a short baby boom in 2015 as many families decided to have a second child after the communist regime’s draconian one-child policy was lifted. However, instead of continuing to rise, birth rates declined after 2017.

As a result, in this school year, there is a larger-than-usual number of 6-7-year-old children enrolling in elementary schools, creating a shortage of school capacity for these kids. Meanwhile, due to the irregular pattern of birth rates, kindergartens are currently struggling to recruit enough students. By 2025, elementary schools will experience the same problem after seeing a spike in enrollments in these two years.

Born in 2016, 2017

The ruling regime replaced its one-child policy with a two-child policy in 2016 in an attempt to reverse the trend of a shrinking population in the future. This prompted some families to have a second child. However, the two-child trend failed to sustain momentum, which lead to a three-child policy in 2021.

In a few months, children born in 2016 and 2017 in China will start elementary school. However, all across China, schools have issued warnings about the limited supply of elementary and secondary school places.

It has been widely reported in the Chinese state media recently that many places in China have issued early warnings for school places in the 2023 school year starting in Autumn. It is expected that there will be a huge shortage of school places all over the communist nation.

The Chinese state media said that the shortage of school places has been ongoing in some areas of China for several years, but the issue is amplified this year due to a surge in enrollment as a result of the two-child policy.

The current capacity of Chinese schools was designed for the previous one-child policy. The sudden revision into a two-child policy created the unexpected wave of births, burdening the elementary schools this year. This is happening in China despite the fact that the overall population is declining.

Recently, there have been waves of kindergarten closures in China as demand for early childhood education has plummeted. This trend is in stark contrast to just two years ago when there was an abundance of children seeking to enroll in early childhood centers.

The everyday declining enrollment is pushing competition between different kindergartens. Even exclusive kindergartens previously serving families of elite state corporations are now opening their enrollment quotas to the public.

Universities Facing Closure

China’s declining birth rate is likely to have a delayed effect on the nation’s secondary schools and universities in the upcoming years. At present, China’s universities have quietly started downsizing enrollment quotas; in January this year, more than a dozen provinces in China issued policies to halt the founding of new universities.

Graduating students attend a commencement ceremony at Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications in Chongqing, China, on June 22, 2022. Cnsphoto via Reuters

Ding Changfa, associate professor of economics at Xiamen University, told Chinese news outlet First Financial in February 2023 that colleges and universities in China are greatly affected by the declining birth rate. In the future, it is expected that some public higher education institutions and private universities will face closure, Ding said.

Zhang Yi, a researcher at the elite Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, wrote an article analyzing the time between the seventh and eighth census in China. He concluded that China will experience a decrease in the number of secondary schools due to the decline in the school-age population at this level. This will also lead to the enrollment numbers in colleges and universities being affected to some extent.

Data Claims Negative Population Growth

On Jan. 17, 2023, China’s National Bureau of Statistics released data revealing that the country’s annual births in 2022 fell below 10 million, which was lower than the annual death rate, and that the natural population growth rate turned from positive to negative. The country’s population declined by 850,000 compared to the previous year.

The natural population growth rate is the ratio of the natural increase in population (number of births minus deaths) to the average total population over a certain period of time (usually one year), which reflects the trend and speed of natural population growth.

Outside of the education sector, China’s negative population growth will be one of the greatest challenges facing its economy in the coming years.