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The Geopolitics of Higher Education
February 8, 2008
Alex Usher, Vice President, Educational Policy Institute
One of the most fascinating recent developments in higher education is the changes in its geography and geopolitics. It used to be that that students and professors were fairly immobile. You went to school within your own country and you taught within your own country. Sudden floods of professors from one country to another were cause for concern, not celebration. Canada spent a good chunk of the late 60s worrying about how many American profs were being hired by our universities (which were growing quickly and needed more instructors than our small PhD programs could provide).
During the post-war period, international students were a key ideological battle-ground. Going to a Soviet university was de rigeur for aspiring politicians in China, Eastern Europe, and parts of Africa, and the US developed a number of programs such as Fulbright to spread good will among emerging elites around the world. As now, "capturing" international students was a matter of national prestige.
With the passing of the cold war, “capturing” foreign students remained a major goal in many developed countries, but less for reasons of prestige than for the lucrative dollars foreign student represented to cash-strapped universities. And in many cases, this “capture” then led to immigration; US science has been notably dependent on promising foreign (mainly Asian) students arriving to do advanced studies and then staying in the country to work. This strategy of using higher education as “bait” in the “brain gain” game proved very successful for the US and UK especially right through to the end of the 1990s.
But since the 1990s, the concept of international students “moving” to attend PSE has changed dramatically. First, the flows are no longer as unidirectional as they used to be. Bright students from poor countries used to be more likely to stay in rich countries after they were done because of the greater opportunities available to them there; changes in the global economy meant this was no longer quite so certain. In Europe, increasing integration and the Erasmus program have combined to make cross-border circulation of students a reality for hundreds of thousands each year.
Indeed, in some respects, international students no longer need to move at all. Chinese students can obtain an English education at the University of Nottingham's Ningbo campus, just as students in Qatar and the UAE can choose to attend educational institutions set up there by any number of North American institutions. To say nothing, of course, of going on line; students from around the world are attending out-of-country universities via the internet, and more join their ranks every year.
In short, the game of attracting international students has changed dramatically. I saw this first hand last year in Tanzania when I saw an advertisement in one of Dar Es Salaam's daily papers. “Study in Malaysia,” the ad said, “at some of the best American and British Universities.” To those North American institutions that are serious about tapping foreign markets and not figuring out ways of delivering education abroad, the message is simple. You are not just missing the boat: it actually sailed a few years ago.
Obviously, the mad scramble for students in foreign countries is about slightly more than money. As any Rhodes or Fulright scholars will tell you, student mobility is in part about the importing country projecting a country's "soft power" abroad, as returning students go home with fond memories of their hosts. It is, broadly, about national interest, too.
But those promoting the internationalization of education based solely on soft power are barking up the wrong tree. Because the real money, the real future, and the real battles lie not with capturing ever greater numbers and flows of students; it's about capturing faculty. And not just any faculty, but “super” faculty.
A lot has been made recently of the need to attract “superstar” faculty in all disciplines (see especially John Allemang's recent piece in the Globe and Mail. But the fact is that the very, very top researchers can have a significant impact on a university's bottom line because they are incredibly productive and innovative and attract loads of money. Indeed, having clusters of excellent scientists in particular areas can have major impacts not just on a university's bottom line, but on a country's as well – check out Finland and Estonia’s rise in high tech, for example.
There exist a finite number of top professorial brains out there – maybe 50,000 at most – who are genuinely worth fighting for because of the prestige and economic benefits that their presence brings. They are incredibly valuable economic property because of the potential value in future commercializable research they represent. As an economic resource, they are as important to the North American economy as Mexico's silver mines were to the Spanish in the 16th century.
The problem is that these people are much more mobile than they used to be. You can’t just train them and expect them to stay in place because they are willing to travel the world in search of the right research opportunities. Even big name schools have to watch their backs: faculty are prepared to leave Yale for the University of Alberta if the latter can spend enough money on new state-of-the-art labs to attract them.
The fight for these faculty members, these brains, these resources, is therefore a fight for economic gain. National governments are right to want to hoard as many of them as possible. The reaction of many national governments to their country’s poor results in international university rankings schemes is testament to that. In France, for instance, the Shanghai rankings have unleashed an enormous amount of efforts at institutional reform because they made clear (and perhaps exaggerated) how far France had fallen behind Anglo-Saxon countries. In other countries, the fight for top talent is driving the creation of more and more American-style research universities which – rightly or wrongly – are perceived as the kind of institution these top 50,000 professors prefer.
This is, to borrow a phrase from my colleague Jan Sadlak of UNESCO, the “new geopolitics” of higher education. Compared to earlier higher education geopolitics, it is less about students and more about professors; more about economics and less about “soft power.” And because it is about economics, it is a lot more ruthless than it used to be. National governments are interested in higher education as a competitive economic weapon; but it’s a competition to hire elites, not to educate the masses. As the Chinese and others are showing, there’s nothing special about high attainment rates any more. Anyone thinking about higher education policy will need to take this new geopolitical reality into account over the next decade or so.
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