By NNN-IRNA,
Tehran : Minister of Science, Research and Technology Mohammad-Mehdi Zahedi said here 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 Sunday.
Zahedi said that girls constitute 60 per cent of the state-run universities’ students and 51 per cent 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 per cent.