TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

China’s increasing rate of education is astounding:

Sheer numbers make the educational push by China, a nation of more than 1.3 billion people, potentially breathtaking. In the last decade, China doubled the number of colleges and universities, to 2,409.

As recently as 1996, only one in six Chinese 17-year-olds graduated from high school. That was the same proportion as in the United States in 1919. Now, three in five young Chinese graduate from high school, matching the United States in the mid-1950s.

They have very little choice but to increase the number of people receiving a college education at a dramatic rate because China must transition from infrastructure investment and low-cost labor-fueled growth to an economy based more around consumption and higher-value work in the next two decades.

Their challenge, though, is that finding qualified people to teach is very difficult, and that while they may be increasing the quantity of students receiving a college education, they are not necessarily receiving one of the same quality as international schools provide.