This report focuses on education policies across two nations, focusing specifically on STEM higher education, and more specifically on the two nations’ efforts to increase the number of students in STEM-related fields. The main goal of increasing the number of students in STEM-related subjects in higher education has been to create an ecology of STEM education, something which has been established by one of the nations in this report, the USA. Through years of development, the USA has left an ecological footprint of STEM education which fits into the cultural, historical, political, and economic context of the USA. However, this context also has limitations, in particular low percentages of female and minority students, and low accessibility for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and certain states. The second country, China, has also been working on building up an ecology of STEM education, and considers actively improving the number of students in STEM higher education to be a strategic national movement, launching a series of educational policies and implementations, which could be considered as a process of policy borrowing, the main factor associated with which has been globalisation. This brings us to the main point of this report: globalisation has a fundamental influence on the education system, and sometimes can even offer opportunities to reform a nation’s education system. Besides globalisation, some ideas associated with neoliberalism have also been linked with the challenges that global STEM education is facing.

Yuechen Miao. The Practice of STEM Education in Higher Education Context: China and USA. International Journal of New Developments in Education (2023) Vol. 5, Issue 22: 17-25. https://doi.org/10.25236/IJNDE.2023.052204.

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