Afterword

In higher education, as in just about every twenty-first-century human endeavor, it seems hard to imagine that globalization will ever go away. National borders are simply less relevant than they once were. Student and faculty mobility has exploded. Cross-national research collaboration is more common than ever. Branch campuses abound. Research universities compete with rivals well beyond their own shores. Global college rankings proliferate. For-profit firms rush to cater to demand in new markets. The merit principle becomes increasingly dominant, both within and across nations. The best students shop for universities like consumers in a worldwide marketplace.

That said, numerous questions about the future of globalized higher education remain unanswered. The rising mobility of recent decades seems likely to continue—but at what rate and in which directions? Will the cross-border movement of students begin to shift from a mostly elite to a mass phenomenon? Will countries like India, which has erected among the world’s highest barriers to foreign universities, continue on a protectionist path or take a new, market-oriented direction? What new forms might the increasingly popular global college rankings take? Will the explosive growth of vocationally oriented for-profit institutions continue?

Whatever direction global higher education takes going forward, one thing is clear: the growing number of internationally mobile students, intent on finding excellence in research and teaching, have already begun to create a world in which, to an unprecedented extent, talent can be identified and find the best possible academic home—a version of what, in real estate, is known as the “highest and best use.” Policymakers seeking to reap the advantages of a thriving and open higher education system will make little headway toward creating good universities, let alone globally great ones, without understanding that meritocracy and the free exchange of ideas form the core of the university.

The World Bank’s Jamil Salmi offers a cautionary tale that illustrates this lesson perfectly, by describing the divergent paths taken by the University of Malaya and the National University of Singapore after Malaysia became independent from Great Britain and Singapore was for several years a province of the Malaysian Kingdom. The two universities had similar cultural and colonial roots, thus offering what Salmi calls a “natural experiment” showing how different policies can produce quite different results.¹ Initially, the University of Malaya had two campuses, one in Kuala Lumpur and another in Singapore. The latter split off to become first the University of Singapore, then the National University of Singapore, or NUS, following a 1980 merger with Nanyang University. Today, NUS is a powerhouse both regionally and globally, and is pushing hard to become a global scholarly hub through partnerships with top universities around the world. It placed 19th in the 2006 Times Higher rankings. The University of Malaya, by contrast, “struggles as a second-tier research university,” standing at 192nd in the Times Higher league tables.

How did this happen? To begin with, the Malaysian government gave preferential admissions treatment to the majority population of ethnic Malays, or Bumiputras. Between the early 1970s and the late 1980s, their numbers shot up from one-third to two-thirds of the student population. The downside of this affirmative-action policy, however, was that many talented ethnic Chinese and Indian students couldn’t gain admission to the university; the percentage of Chinese students, for example, plummeted from 56 to 29 during the same period. Many sought education overseas, depriving the country of important human capital. Efforts to revisit this policy sparked student demonstrations and a sharp rebuke by the prime minister. The Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education didn’t help matters by an overtly protectionist policy that places a limit of 5 percent on the number of foreign undergraduates who can enroll in the nation’s public universities. Funding levels are also lackluster. And those financial constraints, combined with restrictive civil service rules, make it extremely hard to attract top-level faculty, in particular those from foreign countries.

By contrast, NUS seems to have done everything right. It has actively sought to recruit foreign students, who make up 20 percent of undergraduates and 43 percent of graduate students. In an effort to boost the university’s intellectual capital, it also subsidizes their studies—a far cry from the predominant tuition-generating function that foreign students often serve in the United Kingdom and Australia. Its per-student spending is about 50 percent higher than the University of Malaya’s, thanks to a combination of government spending, fund-raising, and investment revenue that have given NUS a budget almost twice as large as its nearby competitor’s. One final distinguishing feature of NUS’s rise to excellence is that it has cultivated a meritocratic culture, backed by resources and freed from bureaucratic hiring constraints, that has allowed it not only to hire away many of Malaysia’s best researchers but also, as Salmi writes, “to bring in top researchers and professors from all over the world, pay a global market rate for them, and provide performance incentives to stimulate competition and to retain the best and the brightest.” This story is not purely of historical interest. It should be read instead as a road map for countries striving for academic excellence.

Still, in many places that road is not easy to follow. As Philip Altbach noted in a 2007 speech, “Many of the world’s universities are not meritocratic institutions. People are appointed because of who they know, because they’re in certain categories of the population.”² For nations and universities that want to become part of the global academic conversation, such corrupt policies are untenable. Will governments and universities seeking excellence in a global academic market take the right path? Altbach himself is pessimistic, at least when it comes to non-elite institutions. But a strong case can be made that the market pressures of academic globalization will make it harder than ever to cling to cronyism and mediocrity. Certainly, nobody will be able to say that the general contours of the route to success aren’t clear. Nor is there much doubt about the benefits to be gained for nations that embrace the merit principle along with an open educational market.

The biggest factor driving continued growth in higher education worldwide, both within nations and across borders, is the mounting evidence of the economic benefits of postsecondary education for both individuals and societies. It may be a commonplace to say that the world has moved from a manufacturing to a service to a knowledge economy, but sometimes truisms are just that—true. Universities help individuals widen their intellectual horizons and improve their economic prospects. Universities also produce research that fosters innovation and entrepreneurship, and hence economic growth. As economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz write in their influential 2008 book The Race between Education and Technology, “Human capital, embodied in one’s people, is the most fundamental part of the wealth of nations.”³

To compete successfully in the community of nations, a modern economy clearly must embrace not only elementary and secondary schooling but also higher education. And improving universities will increasingly require taking part in a global conversation of ideas and a global exchange of scholars. The good news is that more and more nations are joining this movement. The bad news is that mercantilism—the outdated notion that a nation’s economic prosperity rests on its ability to hold on to the maximum possible share of a finite amount of global capital—persists in higher education. Almost every day brings word of policy directives large and small that are apparently driven by restrictionist impulses. In October 2009, to take a small but telling example, administrators at Russia’s prestigious St. Petersburg State University told professors that they must obtain advance approval to publish or present their scholarly work overseas.⁴ Following alarmed reaction from faculty members, the university announced the following month that the policy would apply only to research with potential military applications. It maintained that concern about potential censorship of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences “stems from insufficient information about the real state of affairs.”⁵

It is certainly hard to see how Russia’s competitiveness could possibly be advanced by barring intellectual “exports.” Nor, in other nations, does limiting the presence of foreign universities or foreign students do any favors for economic growth and innovation. Just as constraining traditional forms of trade hurts consumers and stymies economic creativity, closing doors to the free flow of people and ideas thwarts knowledge generation, which is the lifeblood of successful economies.

Broadly speaking, there is every reason to be optimistic about the continued globalization of higher education. If knowledge is not seen as a finite resource but as a public good open to all, educational institutions that generate knowledge should be welcomed everywhere. So should the talented students who roam the globe seeking the best opportunities they can find. The challenge will be to fend off periodic bouts of academic protectionism, whether directed at branch campuses, at foreign students, at the export of scholarship or human talent, or at ascendant institutions in distant lands that are wrongly perceived as a threat to domestic universities.

For a nation like the United States, long the front-runner in the race for global academic preeminence, today’s changing international environment should not be a cause for panic. Neither a gradual erosion in the U.S. market share of students nor the emergence of ambitious new competitors in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East means that American universities are on some inevitable path to decline. Indeed, in many ways this new competition is flattering, testimony to the extraordinary post–War War II success of U.S. institutions. In almost every case, the American research university, combining top-quality research and teaching within one institution, has become the model every other nation wants to clone—just as U.S. universities themselves emulated the pioneering German universities of the nineteenth century.

The United States should respond to the globalization of higher education not with fear but with a sense of possibility. There is nothing wrong with nations competing, trying to improve their citizens’ human capital and to reap the economic benefits that come with more and better education. Moreover, as many economists observe, research discoveries in other nations provide fodder for American innovators and may redound to the benefit of the U.S. economy. By continuing to recruit and welcome the best students in the world, by sending more students overseas, by fostering cross-national research collaboration, and by cooperating in efforts to better measure the effectiveness of universities, the United States not only will sustain its own academic excellence but also will continue to expand the sum total of global knowledge.

Today’s period of university globalization is at first glance a far cry from the era inaugurated by the wandering scholars of medieval Europe, the earliest academic globe-trotters in the West. But there are unmistakable parallels. Knowledge changes the world. And with the right kind of encouragement, the far-reaching intellectual ferment now under way could have a transformational effect similar to that of the twelfth-century Renaissance of learning. From the United States and Britain to India, China, and the Middle East, policymakers should applaud—and encourage—the movement toward global universities. In changing economic times, the world’s prosperity demands nothing less.