Attitudes to work have also shifted, with strong manifestations of this change in the developing world. While romantics love to idealize the lives of coal miners, factory workers, and farmers, the reality is these are hard, often dirty, and frequently dangerous jobs. For generations, people have sought easier lives, adopting new technologies that removed the more difficult elements of pre-industrial and industrial labour. The glorification of office work and the declining enthusiasm for outdoor and physical labour have convinced parents the world over to invest heavily in their children’s education.
The dreams of university do not play out equally. In the West, college or university education has become a rite of passage, something parents plan and save for throughout their children’s youth. In other nations, however, getting into a degree-granting institution is no real accomplishment; entrance standards have fallen to derisory levels at many public and some private institutions. In richer countries, getting into the “right” institution—Oxford rather than the University of Arts London, Stanford over Clark Atlanta University of Georgia, University of Toronto over Algoma University—is the real struggle. Many families spend tens of thousands of dollars in trying to game the admissions system in order to secure a coveted spot in an elite institution. But still young people go to universities, even those of low and dubious abilities, in ever-increasing numbers.
Nowhere is the mystique of the Dream Factory more firmly entrenched than in the developing world, even though the local institutions, even the elite ones, are markedly inferior to the best universities elsewhere. Families spend enormous sums on prestigious local preparatory schools, often English-language and typically internationally-branded, in the hope that this will help their sons and daughters win admission to Oxford or Stanford or MIT. They then hand over large amounts of money to agents, some of whom are of dubious quality, who help children prepare for international admissions processes. They are met by hundreds of college and university recruiters, desperate for the high-fee-paying international students they increasingly rely on to pay their institutions’ bills.
The international-student recruitment process has turned into a high-stakes dating game. The students—and their parents—have their eyes on the elite institutions and the preferred countries (the USA, UK, Australia, Canada, Germany and New Zealand, but China and Japan are increasingly attractive as well). There are family dreams and a great deal of money at stake—an international student will, over four years, pay more than US$200,000 in tuition at a top-ten American school, £40,000 to £140,000 in the UK, AUS$120,000 in Australia and as much as CDN$140,000 in Canada, depending on the program. But there is no lack of students. China sends over 275,000 students per year to the United States, representing over 30 percent of the international student total. India is in second place, at about 12 percent.
While rich families can afford the price of attending a Dream Factory—each year Harvard, Oxford, and the Sorbonne welcome dozens of the children from the world’s wealthiest families—middle-class and working-class families often mortgage the future of the extended family to make attendance possible. Recruiting agents, frequently paid by both the families and the recruiting institutions, try to align interests, abilities, and admission standards. The dependence on a single country can lead to questionable behaviour at the institutional level. One American school created a real stir when it was revealed that the university was adjusting entrance grades and taking extraordinary steps to ensure that the students stayed on campus, primarily to ensure a steady flow of international-student cash. One can only imagine the educational and financial calculus of international families as they balance savings, a child’s academic record, the admission standards of thousands of overseas institutions, the educational and career interests of the student, and the family’s strategy for migration and/or employment.
But as parents and young people began vigorously pursuing a limited number of places at the very best universities, other institutions saw an opportunity, expanding to meet a seemingly inexhaustible demand. Aggressive as well as prestigious institutions, particularly from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, opened campuses overseas. New York University brought its high-quality, high-cost liberal-arts education to Dubai and Singapore. Monash opened campuses in Malaysia and South Africa. James Cook University, a rising but little-known institution in Queensland that focuses on tropical areas, has campuses in Cairns, Townsville, and Brisbane, and overseas facilities in Singapore. George Mason University in Virginia has a campus in Songdo, South Korea. Some of these have foundered, including the University of Waterloo’s effort in Dubai and some costly experiments by British universities in China.
Profiting from the Dream
But even with a few faltering steps, the trajectory remained the same: students from around the world were clamoring for higher education. Universities salivated at the possibilities, domestically because this justified rapid expansion, and internationally because the high tuition paid in most nations underpinned the increasingly precarious financial situation on campuses.
Governments loved the expansion as well. The arrival of thousands of international students, many of them well-heeled, did more than expand the university enrolments. The students spent money on everything from housing and food to cars and entertainment—and more than a little on alcohol—boosting the local and national economies in the process. Hosting international students became an industry in its own right. Australia declared international students to be worth AUS$16.3 billion in 2013–14.[18] Other countries, aided by bean-counting university organizations, spoke enthusiastically about the $7.7 billion Canadian sector,[19] the $22 billion brought into the United States,[20] and the £2.3 billion contributed to the United Kingdom’s economy every year.[21]
The situation seemed like a match made in heaven. Young people wanted to go to university. Their parents were willing to foot the bill to send them overseas. The receptor universities were happy to welcome them, with the elite institutions selecting some of the brightest (and wealthiest) students on the planet and the lower-ranked universities hoovering up thousands of full-fee-paying students, albeit often of lower academic standing. Governments bought in big time, welcoming the annual infusion of cash into the local economies. Few complained—and surprisingly little thought was given to the simple question of whether or not this massive expansion in university attendance was connected to the needs of the national and global economies.
Others saw commercial opportunities in the global preoccupation with the Dream Factories. A massive industry of agents grew up around the world, with specialists, some qualified and honest, others not, promising parents and students access to the best universities. No one really knows the balance between those with integrity and those who are simply eager for cash. Add to this the privately run housing units, immigration lawyers (it is not automatic that the students admitted to even a top university will get the appropriate visas in a timely fashion), travel agents, and the like who cluster around the international-student industry. Not surprisingly, fraudsters gathered. Recently Mark Zinny, an ex-Harvard teacher and “educational consultant,” was sentenced in Boston to five years in prison for scamming a Chinese family for $2 million in fees and bribes to get their sons into top prep schools and colleges. The Boston Globe commented that “the case calls attention to the dark side of a growing international admissions consulting industry, as more foreign families seek to send their students to elite US schools at any cost.”[22]
The private sector has also stepped in to compete with public institutions for fee-paying students. The for-profit companies engage at many levels in the educational process. Private secondary schools offer students from non-Western countries high-quality, internationally recognized diplomas that give them a leg up on students graduating from domestic high schools. There is a large global network of English-language training centres, most operating on a for-profit basis and many targeted at helping would-be international