Education expansion
The stunning expansion of higher education constitutes one of the biggest changes to the world in the past 100 or so years. In 1900, there were only 500,000 students in the world; today, the figure is 100m. From less than 1 per cent of school-leavers, the ratio has jumped to one in five.
While the level of higher education, and its quality, is not the same everywhere, the surge has happened across the world. One must look as far afield as Afghanistan under the Taliban to find a country that has significantly shrunk its higher education system in recent decades.
There has long been resistance among business leaders to the expansion of education. In 1899 in the US, the president of Stanford University felt obliged to dispel the myth that “education is of no value to a businessman”.
There are concerns about whether labour markets can swallow all of these graduates, and about whether degree requirements for relatively lowly jobs will inhibit social mobility.
But there is little doubt that innovation in developed countries is fuelled by the massive increase in the basic education of its citizens. Indeed, the west’s universities attract great innovators from the developing world. This has drastic effects on society and economies.
As Evan Schofer and John Meyer, sociologists at Stanford, argue: “The modern world is knit together in an elite power structure of people more schooled in a cosmopolitan world culture than in their own local one, and linked more tightly to each other than to their own populations.”
The concentration of excellent universities in the developed world means the best and brightest of the emerging world aspire to leave their homelands for a spell – and many do not return. The expansion has created effects that support existing elites and successful countries.
Change may be coming, however. Online courses tend to be a little flimsy and lack the community experience of college life, but they are growing increasingly sophisticated. Within the next 20 years it may be possible to get the full university experience at home.
Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge will never be troubled by the rise of online higher education. But if the quality and prestige of online courses start to catch up with those of lesser universities, the expansion of the past century may have nothing on growth in the next one.
Chris Cook