Educating Engineers at Scale: Why Collaboration with China Now Matters
Innovation today is defined by how effectively knowledge moves from education to experimentation to deployment. Over the past 25 years, China has built one of the world’s most continuous and scalable engineering education systems, with direct consequences for global innovation capacity.
China now produces approximately 1.5 million engineering graduates annually, bringing the technical workforce to over 5 million engineers. By comparison, the EU-27 produces roughly 650,000 engineers annually, while Belgium graduates about 3,500 engineers per year, despite an estimated shortage of more than 10,000 engineers. These numbers are not abstract. They determine who can staff pilot projects, validate systems, and scale technologies across full value chains. China Engineers and STEM
This is not a question of academic excellence. Europe continues to host outstanding universities and research groups. The issue is structural. Europe performs strongly at TRL 1–3, struggles at TRL 4–6, and faces serious bottlenecks at TRL 7–9, where technologies must be validated, industrialized, and deployed. China operates in the opposite direction once domains become engineering-dominant rather than discovery-dominant.
China’s advantage stems from the alignment of:
- large, meritocratic STEM pipelines
- tight coupling between universities, industry, and manufacturing
- rapid prototyping, validation, and scale-up capacity
As a result, innovation becomes statistical, according to Jimmy Xiao. When millions of engineers enter the system every year, high-impact outcomes are no longer exceptional. They are inevitable.
This dynamic is already visible across sectors that depend on system integration and deployment speed, including energy systems, urban sensing, AI-driven optimization, batteries, electric mobility, and environmental modeling. It also explains why China is advancing rapidly in frontier areas such as AI-supported simulation and quantum computing, with direct implications for future building performance modeling, optimization under uncertainty, and large-scale urban climate analysis.
Over the past three years, the Sustainable Building Design Lab has developed sustained research collaborations with Chinese universities and institutes, grounded in joint supervision, experimental validation, shared datasets, and peer-reviewed publications. In 2026, I will document this collaboration openly, through weekly posts, field visits, videos, and publications, with the explicit aim of encouraging serious, long-term scientific cooperation.
This is an invitation to engage, learn, and collaborate. For further reading:
Attia, S. (2026). China’s STEM flywheel and Europe’s TRL trap: Why innovation pipelines now matter more than ideas (Working paper). Sustainable Building Design Lab, University of Liège. https://orbi.uliege.be/handle/2268/339196
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