An international symposium on college education opened on December 7 at Nanjing University, a prestigious school of higher learning in the capital city of east China's Jiangsu Province.

The symposium will discuss how to upgrade the quality of college education, covering a range of topics that include schools of higher learning in the 21st century, educational reform and assessing the quality of education.

More than 80 experts and scholars from China, Germany, Canada and Malaysia have come to participate in the three-day event. The symposium is sponsored by the Chinese Society for College Teaching.

There are more than 9,000 institutions of higher learning in the world with over 70 million students.