Chinese universities produced far more science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) doctorates than their U.S. counterparts in the last year available for comparison, signaling a gap in the future competitiveness of the world’s two largest economies.
Directly comparing countries’ education systems is difficult because of different definitions of STEM. But official data from China and the U.S. still reveal a divergence in the countries’ talent development.
“The U.S.’s weakness in developing domestic STEM talent is perhaps its greatest national security vulnerability,” says Stephen Ezell, vice president for global innovation policy at ITIF, a think tank, noting that the U.S. could face a shortfall of 3.5 million STEM workers by 2025.
After two decades of growth, Chinese universities awarded more than 50,000 STEM doctorates in 2022, up 13.7% from 2021, according to the latest data from China’s Ministry of Education. China publishes data only for broad STEM fields, such as engineering, science, and agriculture. In 2022, engineering was the most popular field (59.1%) among Chinese STEM doctorates, followed by science (33.5%) and agriculture (7.4%).
The United States, on the other hand, provides more detailed data on fields such as biochemistry, computer science, and physics. In 2022, American universities awarded nearly 34,000 STEM doctorates, up 12% from 2021, according to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. In 2023, the figure remained steady.
Jacob Feldgoise, an analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), notes that China’s much larger population makes it difficult for the U.S. to compete on raw numbers. Nearly 39 million students were enrolled in undergraduate programs at Chinese public universities in 2024, compared with 19.28 million in the United States.
However, the data also shows a diverging trend that is widening the gap between the two countries. China surpassed the U.S. in the number of STEM doctorates as early as 2007 and doubled that number by 2022. Over the same period, U.S. STEM doctorates grew by just 41%.
“This underscores how crucial it is for the U.S. to attract and retain foreign talent,” Feldgoise adds, “otherwise it risks losing ground to China in research fields.”
Universities are central to competitiveness, training scientific talent and producing cutting-edge research in technologies from artificial intelligence to semiconductors to electric vehicles.
While China has increased public funding for universities, research and talent attraction, the White House has frozen federal funding for America’s top universities. For example, the Department of Education blocked $2.2 billion in funding and $60 million in contracts from Harvard on April 14, accusing it of anti-Semitism. The university, which denies the accusations, is suing to overturn the measure. Cornell and Northwestern have also faced similar blocks.
“While China is ramping up its STEM research, the current US administration is holding the country back by cutting funding for university research, making it easier for China to overtake in strategic technology industries,” Ezell says.
A gap is also evident in university research in key fields. In mathematics and computer science, China dominates the rankings of universities with the most high-level publications, according to the CWTS Leiden citation-based ranking.
However, China’s size does affect the data. Its universities are not particularly good at quality: a lower percentage of publications are in the top 5% of their fields compared to the US and other countries. In the sciences overall, American institutions outperform many Chinese ones in both quantity and quality. Although India has similar numbers of STEM PhDs to China, none of its universities appear in the top 25 of the Leiden ranking.
A similar trend is seen in AI. Between 2018 and 2023, Chinese researchers produced 28% of global AI papers, compared with 16% for the US (source: ETO Research Almanac). But average citations per paper, a proxy for quality, were nearly double for Americans.
These trends have a real impact on global competition.
“Higher education is increasingly being ‘instrumentalized’ by political entities to serve national and strategic agendas,” said Wen Wen, a professor at Tsinghua University’s Institute of Education, in a webinar on China’s international collaboration in STEM research beyond the West.
With innovation driving economic competitiveness, talent has become a crucial front in the battle for global supremacy between China and the United States.