Recently, a tweet from Lanzhou University put itself on the social media hot topic list. In this public article, Lanzhou University claims that in recent years, the scale of its graduate enrollment has been expanding year by year. In 2024, the total number of graduate students on campus exceeded the total number of undergraduate students for the first time, and in 2019, the annual enrollment of graduate students exceeded that of undergraduate students. For a time, the topic of 'inverted' in this study attracted considerable attention and discussion. The reason why it is called "inverted" is because in people's inherent cognition, academic education is a pyramid structure. If undergraduate education is a solid backbone, then graduate education, including master's and doctoral degrees, is the top of the pyramid. At present, the gross enrollment rate of higher education in China has exceeded 60%, and higher education has entered the stage of popularization. Going to university is not difficult, and people have accepted the reality of the popularization of undergraduate education. However, for graduate education, although the pace of expansion has never stopped since 2000, people still prefer to see it as an elite education. Therefore, when graduate students, who are regarded as elite education in cognition, are no longer "scarce" and even exceed undergraduate students in number, it is difficult not to touch people's sensitive nerves. It is a fact that the undergraduate program at Lanzhou University has been inverted, and this phenomenon has already been observed in universities in Beijing, Shanghai, Sichuan, and other places, so it is not a new phenomenon. According to publicly available information, the number of graduate graduates from Tongji University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2023 will be nearly 2000 more than that of undergraduate graduates; In Sichuan, both the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China and Sichuan University have more graduate students than undergraduate students this year. In 2023, "the number of master's and doctoral graduates in Beijing exceeds that of undergraduate students for the first time" became a hot topic. However, these are not a nationwide microcosm. Reviewing and analyzing these inverted cases of undergraduate research, most of which are comprehensive and research-oriented universities, cultivating high-level talents is their development direction and goal; Or the school itself is located in an economically strong province or city, and urban development has a strong demand for the social service function of graduate education and high-level talents. It can be said that the existing talent output structure presented by these universities is the result of multiple driving forces shaping it together. For example, Lanzhou University, as an important research center in northwest China, is required to increase the quantity and quality of high-level talent cultivation, whether it is for the development of higher education connotation or the "spillover" demand for high-level talents in surrounding areas. From a national perspective, according to the basic situation of national education development in 2023 released by the Ministry of Education, the enrollment of ordinary undergraduate students is 4.7816 million, and the enrollment of graduate students is 1.3017 million. The inverted enrollment of undergraduate students is not an overall fact. Graduate education is the pinnacle of building an education powerhouse, and high-quality talents are an important support for the development of an education powerhouse. With the sustained and rapid development of China's economy and society, as well as the accelerated transformation and upgrading of industrial structure, the demand for high-quality and high-level talents will only become increasingly urgent and strong. From the policy guidance in recent years, it is the trend to continue expanding graduate enrollment in the fields of serving national strategy and social livelihood. This is also an inevitable requirement for higher education to continuously optimize its structure, improve its quality, and achieve connotative development. A relatively broad social consensus has been formed on this matter. However, people are still concerned about the expansion of graduate enrollment and the resulting "inverted" number of undergraduate students in some universities and regions. On the one hand, some people are concerned that the continuous increase in the number of graduate students may exacerbate the disadvantaged position of undergraduate graduates in the job market, intensify competition for graduate employment, and indirectly promote the worship of academic qualifications. On the other hand, the continuous increase in the number of graduate students has brought pressure in terms of faculty, accommodation, and other hardware and software aspects, which has also made people pay more attention to the quality of graduate education. In recent years, the issues of tight accommodation for college students and high teacher-student ratios have repeatedly sparked discussions. The traditional emphasis on education coupled with the continuous upward shift of social filters may bring certain academic anxiety to people. But we should also rationally recognize that undergraduate and graduate students have their own positions and advantages in the ecological niche of higher education and talent market. Individuals still need to make choices that are suitable for themselves based on their own situation. In the era of popularization of higher education, we should also reverse the inertia of academic thinking, pay more attention to the cultivation of personal comprehensive abilities and qualities, and use this as a starting point to make plans for personal learning and career development, enhancing personal core competitiveness. Of course, the transition from "education" to "ability" requires a series of social evaluations, including employers, to make changes and create corresponding environments and conditions. The fundamental solution to eliminate people's concerns about the difficulty of employment and the decline in the "value" of graduate students is to ensure and improve the quality of graduate education, truly achieve the goal of "cultivating students' innovative qualities and abilities", and better adapt to and meet the needs of society. Targeting the future development needs of the country, timely adjusting the layout of talent cultivation, continuously adjusting and improving the postgraduate training program, strengthening differentiated training between professional master's and academic master's, enhancing the carrying capacity of teaching resources and other resources in postgraduate education through increased investment, and fully leveraging the function of postgraduate education as a pillar of talent reserve dividends. At the same time, we need to strengthen the transformation and upgrading of industrial structure, make it more compatible with the talent output structure of higher education, increase the vitality of the job market, and fully unleash the talent dividend. (New Society)