Iran's student population up 20-fold in 30 years - minister

Tehran, Nov 17, IRNA Minister of Science, Research and Technology Mohammad-Mehdi Zahedi
said here Sunday that Iran's student population has increased 20 times
from that at the start of the Islamic Revolution.

"Early in the (1979 Islamic) Revolution, 170,000 out of a population
of 35 million Iranians were students but today there are some 3.5
million students; this means that the student population has grown 20
times from that at the start of the Revolution," said Zahedi in a
meeting with a group of the US deans of colleges and
universities.

Zahedi said that girls constitute 60 percent of the state-run
universities' students and 51 percent of other Iranian universities'
students.

He said that at the beginning of the revolution, there were Ph.D.

courses for 10 branches of sciences but now there is Ph.D. for all
branches of science.

He added that some 500 international-level scientific articles and
essays were produced annually in the early years of the Revolution but
the number of Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) articles stood
at 13,000 in 2008. The same number of articles were published in other
well-credited magazines, showing a rise of 52 percent.

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