As a new sustainable alternative to linear economics, the circular economy (CE) is bound to be accompanied by the requirements of the existing production model, science and technology, as well as the public perception of CE. To expose the potential impact of higher education on CE transition, this study systematically reviewed the relevant literature on the drivers and barriers to CE with a mixed analytical method. CiteSpace was used to perform bibliometric analysis and visual presentation of 367 literature accurately retrieved by search formula from two international influential databases, Web of Science and Scopus, and two significant Chinese databases, CNKI and CQVIP. In the results, we identified the number of publications and citations, the annual distribution of publications, annual citation trends, county distribution of publication contribution, the most-cited articles, and the co-citation networks. Moreover, we clarified the main drivers and barriers to CE in China by conducting qualitative content of the keywords related to driver and barrier factors in the literature. The results suggest that higher education has a positive influence on strengthening the main drivers and eliminating the main barriers, which implies that higher education has bright prospects in speeding up the CE transition. To maximize the effect of higher education for CE, we suggested university leaders and lecturers should adopt effective education and instruction measures in improving the performance of education activities for CE, so that the future leaders of various industries in universities could construct CE values and behavior patterns to achieve the replacement of traditional linear economy.