A key reason East Africa had been able to flourish in cutting-edge research fields such as nuclear physics was the sustained effort in its higher education. Although East Africa lacked top-tier giants and was, for the moment, still unable to compare with Europe and America, it possessed the largest number of university students and young scientific workers in the world. Take the East African Nuclear Physics Research Institute: it was staffed entirely by young people, with no one older than forty-five.
In 1905 alone, East Africa had 370,000 university students enrolled. At the time, the entire United Kingdom had only a little over 7,000 university students, while Germany, the European country with the most university students, had only around forty to fifty thousand. The United States also had a relatively large number, exceeding 150,000.
Moreover, while the United States had many universities, many of them were business schools. This also reflected America's commerce-oriented social atmosphere, where most families hoped to replicate the entrepreneurial legends of those American tycoons.
At present, the United States indeed had many wealthy people who had risen from humble beginnings. Thus, the "men of insight" in American society naturally followed public sentiment and established business schools to collect tuition fees. At the same time, high-income professions such as lawyers and doctors were also highly sought after in the United States. As a result, a large proportion of American university education fell outside the sciences and engineering.
East Africa's investment in education had naturally brought it considerable returns as well. Especially during the First Five-Year Plan, East African mainland talent had borne the absolute main burden, something unimaginable seventy or eighty years earlier.
East Africa now trained more mid- to high-level talent each year than all European countries combined. That was why East Africa had been able