Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, The scale of China’s higher education has shifted from the elite stage to the universal stage, realizing a strategic shift from “poor countries running big education” to “big countries running strong education”. Rational expansion of the scale of higher education is not only an important content of the modernization of higher education, but also directly affects the modernization of the structure, quality and benefit of higher education. China to achieve modernization of higher education, firmly in the higher education power, must be paid close attention to changes in higher education scale and its influence on the development of higher education and economic and social development, and actively to predict the trend of higher education scale expansion and level of regulation and control policy, to promote higher education scale sustainable and stable development, high level and high quality. It is found that since the founding of New China, the scale expansion of Higher education in China has experienced four stages: the slow growth stage from 1949 to 1960; The decline period 1961-1970; Medium growth from 1971 to 1999; The high growth phase from 2000 to 2020. This paper adopts the simultaneous equation model of supply and demand, and forecasts based on the data from 1995 to 2019. It is concluded that the number of undergraduates and college students and the gross enrollment rate of undergraduates and college students will reach 80.957 million and 118.51% respectively, realizing the popularization of higher education at an extremely high level by 2035. Considering that the average gross enrollment rate of higher education in developed countries has remained at about 80%-90% since 2000, and the internal logic of higher education development and the diversified demands of economic and social development on talent hierarchy, it is necessary to properly control the scale of Higher education in China. In order to maintain a reasonable scale and expansion rate of higher education, and modernize higher education with high quality, the number of ordinary college students in China should be controlled at about 58 million by 2035, and the annual growth rate of ordinary college students from 2019 to 2035 should be controlled at 4.49 percent. Therefore, it is necessary to increase the market’s regulating effect on the scale of higher education, restrain the excessive demand of individuals and families for higher education, restrain the impulse of college enrollment expansion, and limit the tendency of the government to expand the scale of higher education.