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UNESCO Reveals Countries Producing The Highest No. Of STEM Graduates
It was found that India produced most STEM graduates in 2016.
For a survey, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has collected data that shows the number of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) graduates in various countries. It was reported that tertiary students in Oman and Tunisia were most likely to graduate in a STEM field, with between 43% to 46% of students receiving a degree in engineering, scientific, technical or mathematical field.
Whereas in India, almost 32% of students pick STEM, which, in turn, produced the most graduates in a total of almost 2.7 million in 2018. On the other hand, in 2016, India was the global leader in university graduates (78.0 million), slightly ahead of China (77.7 million). The United States was in third place (67.4 million).
It estimates a 300% increase in the number of Chinese graduates (aged 25 to 34) by 2030 compared to just 30% in the U.S. and Europe. STEM has become a pretty big deal in China's flourishing universities lately. Though UNESCO did not publish data for China. In 2016, the World Economic Forum said that China actually produced 4.7 million STEM graduates a year, which would exceed India’s earlier reported number of 2018, by a large margin. Yet, according to the National Science Foundation, China classifies engineering and science fields quite broadly, leading to a lack of comparability in the data. The U.S. government agency counted 1.6 million Chinese science and engineering graduates in 2014.
Other countries with a huge number of STEM graduates were Germany, Singapore, Malaysia, Algeria, Iran, Myanmar and Belarus, all producing more than 30% STEM graduates. Whereas to compare STEM graduates, only 26% were from the UK, 25% from France, 23% in Spain and 18% in the U.S. and Brazil, respectively.
Source: UNESCO