The 2024 National Master's Entrance Examination will be held from December 23rd to 25th, 2023. For the highly anticipated number of applicants for the postgraduate entrance examination, the Ministry of Education released data one month earlier than previous years: 4.38 million, a decrease of 360000 from the previous year, a decrease of about 7.6%. This also means that the eight consecutive years of growth in the number of applicants for the postgraduate entrance examination in China since 2015 have come to an end. Why has the number of applicants for the postgraduate entrance examination decreased and what new signals have been released? "The fluctuation ratio is less than 1/10, which is within the normal range." "Surprisingly!" said Yu Jie (pseudonym), a candidate from Beijing Forestry University. During the preparation period, Yu Jie felt uneasy. He originally thought that the number of people taking the postgraduate entrance exam would continue to increase, and some even predicted that the number of people taking the exam this year would exceed 5 million. "These predictions gave me a strong sense of urgency," said Yu Jie. In recent years, the number of applicants for master's degree programs in China has maintained a high growth rate. Public data shows that from 2015 to 2022, the average 7-year growth rate was 15.8%. Among them, the number of applicants for the postgraduate entrance examination in 2020 was 3.41 million, 3.77 million in 2021, 4.57 million in 2022, and 4.74 million in 2023. The candidates did not expect the changes to come so quickly. Chen Zhiwen, a member of the expert group of the National Education Examination Guidance Committee, said, "In fact, the number of applicants for the postgraduate entrance examination in 2023 has already grown weakly. In 2023, it only increased by 170000 people compared to the previous year, with a growth rate of 3.7%. Compared with an increase of 800000 people and a growth rate of 21% in 2022, it has significantly declined." The growth of the number of applicants is weak or even reduced - this change has begun to show signs in provinces and popular universities where there have been a large number of applicants in the past. On November 18th, in Huai'an City, Jiangsu Province, college students were selecting job positions at a campus job fair. Last year, the number of applicants for the postgraduate entrance examination in Liaoning and Heilongjiang decreased, while in Sichuan it only increased by 4000. This year, the number of applicants for the postgraduate entrance examination at Nankai University was 15817, which has been declining for two consecutive years, a decrease of 1446 compared to last year. The number of applicants for the postgraduate entrance examination at Beijing University of Science and Technology and China University of Petroleum (East China) decreased by 3.41% and 4.67%, respectively. "The decrease in the number of applicants this time is 360000, with a fluctuation ratio of less than 1/10, which is within the normal range," said Wang Chuanyi, Deputy Director of the Graduate Education Strategy Research Base at Tsinghua University. He introduced that in terms of the number of registered graduate students per thousand people, in 2023, China was 2.6, while countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom were all above 7; From the perspective of the number of employed people with graduate degrees, there are less than 2 people in China for every 100 people, while the United States and the United Kingdom both have more than 10 people. "Compared to developed countries, there is still significant room for improvement in the education level of China's labor force." Wang Chuanyi believes that, "On the one hand, in order to support high-quality economic and social development, graduate education, as the cornerstone of national competitiveness and innovation, will continue to steadily expand its scale, attracting more undergraduate students to enter the graduate stage for further education. On the other hand, from the experience of developed countries, master's degrees will also become the minimum degree to enter the labor market in some fields, especially emerging technologies and specialized vocational fields." He predicts: In the coming years, the number of people taking the postgraduate entrance examination will continue to increase