In the past 100 years, the laws were enacted in many countries to require citizens to attain
secondary education. As a result, the global literacy rate has climbed from 30% to 87% over
the last century (see Fig. 1) [1], mainly because of increased enrollment in primary education.
When the graduates of the secondary education system increased, it caused a higher pressure
to study further in the tertiary education system. Governments felt the strong desire of their
citizens to study in universities.
The leaders of many countries saw a university education as the only way forward to
improve the well-being of their citizens. They believed that an investment in higher education
would create new jobs and higher value-added products, and lead to a more entrepreneurial
society [2]. They allocated additional funds to establish new universities or to support the
current universities to accept more students. The number of universities in the world has
grown to approximately 18,000. In the UK, in the 1960s only around six percent of young
people were applying and getting places in the universities. This number has grown to about
41 percent in the second decade of the twenty-first century. In South Korea [3], the number of
tertiary institutions increased from just one in 1945 to 330 in 2019 (with 2 million students)
[4]. In this country, as of 2019 [5], 68% of the population has a degree from a tertiary
institution, making it the highest in the world.
Even though higher education is believed to be more useful for technologically advanced
societies [6], the growth policy is adopted also in developing countries. Since the average age
in developing countries is lower than that in the developed world, this policy provided higher
