Ever wonder why people attach a premium to top institutions? The race to get in is a key reason. At many of the world’s universities, high school graduation and the ability to pay tuition is sufficient for entry. Take it for granted that students are not banging down the doors to get into the University of Kinshasa, currently ranked 5,959th in the world (but top of the mountain in the Congo). Not surprisingly, parents who want their children to get into the top institutions invest heavily in entrance-examination preparation and pre-testing exercises. In contrast, South Korea and Taiwan, like the United States, have places for almost every high school graduate; there is intense competition for a handful of elite schools, but it’s easy to get into one of the public and private universities in the country. Germany, in contrast, identifies academic potential early on, moving high-quality students into academic streams in their early teens and herding the less bookish into technical and trades programs.
This being the age of universities, however, there are always workarounds. Cannot get into the University of Chicago law school? Go to the University of Windsor, not so far away in Canada and less than a quarter the cost. Turned down for medical school at USC or UCLA? Why not try the University of Guadalajara, which uses the same curriculum and many of the same instructors? Cannot get into a prime law school in the United Kingdom or Canada? The private Bond University—one of the few places named after a convicted felon—offers internationally transportable law degrees. One of the simple truths of this age is that all universities are not created equal and that students in pursuit of a specific credential can often find it—for a price—somewhere in the world.
But universities have some tricks up their sleeves, particularly when governments insist on accessibility as a prime value. Some countries—the Netherlands and Portugal being good examples—believe that accessibility to university is as much of a right as high school attendance. Institutions cope with this intellectually irrational proposition by making a simple point: admission is not a guarantee of graduation. So institutions and programs in high demand among entering students—engineering, design, digital media, and other market-ready programs are currently popular—admit hundreds and hundreds of students, then use the first-year experience to cull the number to a manageable level. Second-year cohorts, entrance to which is closely guarded by program directors, might be limited to 10 percent or fewer of the first-year students. Students who fail to meet the threshold—and clearly they are numbered in the many hundreds—are redirected to lower-demand (and often lower-quality) programs. If the university does not need the extra bodies to cover institutional costs, having sucked government grants and often tuition fees from the first-year students, they can simply let the students leave the university.
The success of colleges and universities in North America has produced many global imitators over the past three decades. While countries with strong resource economies lagged behind—largely because of the continuation of high-wage/low-skill work—nation after nation invested in the rapid expansion of its college and university system. The growth in the wealthier nations was dramatic, building off an institutional base that, in some quarters, was hundreds of years old.
But consider what has occurred at the same time in the developing world. The colonial powers created universities in their overseas possessions, usually training the children of elite families to take their place in the colonial business and governance systems and sending the best of them back to institutions in the mother country. These former colonies, struggling to adjust to industrial competition and globalization, have seized on advanced education as a means of achieving individual and collective prosperity. With many of these countries coping with widespread poverty, serious infrastructure challenges, and limited government resources, distance-education systems and online educational delivery have provided a means of extending advanced education to villages and towns outside of the capital cities. The result has been a massive global increase in the total number of universities and university students.
This expansion has been fraught with irony and contradiction. The colonial powers financed the early stages of the system and trained many faculty and staff members who subsequently found work in developing world institutions. Industrial-world philanthropy, often through global governance organizations such as the United Nations, UNESCO, the World Bank, and private donors, provided further assistance to the international effort. When the system worked—and there were many individual and institutional success stories among a global university system marked by serious inconsistencies in standards and effectiveness—these colleges and universities converted bright young students into globally competitive graduates. To put it bluntly, the leading universities in the leading industrial nations trained their competitors, transferring a significant portion of the educational advantage enjoyed by the West to the emerging economies. India is an excellent example of this process in action. This act of educational philanthropy improved the global economy, strengthening the training in these countries through lifelong commercial and professional contacts with their graduates. Overall, the primary impact was to improve their economic prospects dramatically.
At the individual level, the growing universities of India, China, and other countries are classic Dream Factories, converting potential into achievement and opportunity into personal success, though not necessarily at home. Africa, in recent years, has seen upwards of thirty-five thousand of its best-trained graduates leave the continent each year for further study in first-world institutions or jobs in wealthier countries. Turkey has, over the past decade, financed a ferocious expansion of its university system, focusing largely on engineering and technology, predicated on the belief that these graduates will find work in the European Union, send money home, and eventually return to bolster the country’s economy. Worldwide, more than 4.5 million students are enrolled in university-level education outside their home country, a number that is predicted to rise to 8 million by 2025.[9] The country with the highest percentage of international students studying in its universities is, perhaps surprisingly, Australia—surprising until one thinks of its geographical location.
One of the imperatives behind studying overseas is the idea, particularly strong in China, that young graduates would either enjoy a decided employment advantage when they returned home, or would be able to gain a working visa that could lead to permanent residency in the country of their education. Nations such as Canada, the United States, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom have for several decades capitalized on the talent and education of foreign-born students to buttress their economies, particularly in high-technology sectors.
The commitment to college and university expansion has rested on more than the opportunities for personal advancement. Many countries, observing closely the success of scientific and technological innovation in North America, Japan, East Asia, and northern Europe, and desiring rapid economic expansion, concluded that major commitments to an education and research-rich society would produce favourable economic outcomes for the society as a whole. Countries that had lagged far behind in competitiveness and productivity caught up rapidly. Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea, to use East Asian examples, were transformed as the rapid improvement of the education system underpinned an increasingly technologically proficient society. Other countries, from Finland to Israel, also capitalized on the advanced education of their citizens to create globally competitive economies, in both of these cases underpinned by high-technology industries.
By the early twenty-first century, almost every country in the world believed that national prosperity rested on an expansion of the post-secondary system. The commitment to national innovation through advanced education and basic research became a global mantra, adopted from Greenland to Botswana, with policy manifestations in most nations. (This phenomenon raises the question of how national innovation policies can be “innovative” when they are the same everywhere, copying standard global practice.) The explosion in the number of universities, the number of students, the number of graduates, the number of postgraduate students, the number of faculty members, the amount of research activity and expenditures, and the volume of academic publication has been truly impressive.
Indeed, recent estimates suggest that the knowledge base in the world doubles every five years, a growth rate that boggles the mind. If the total volume of knowledge (judged by published research) stood at 100 in 1980—near the real starting point of the global expansion of universities and colleges—then it would have increased to 12,800 in 2015—128