The involvement of for-profit institutions goes much further than these preparatory stages, however. Private for-profit colleges, often brokering programs from established and accredited institutions, recruit, teach, and graduate their own students, or aid them in transferring mid-program into the more prestigious non-profit institutions. For-profit institutions have proliferated around the world, ranging from the University of Phoenix, Laureate Education, Corinthian Colleges, and University Canada West to hundreds of private institutions in countries such as China, Pakistan, Nigeria, and others. Indeed, the Indian private universities market is growing so rapidly and with so little oversight that it is effectively out of control, as well as of doubtful quality.
But there is money—often big money—to be made in education. And not all of the university aspirants can get into Princeton, UCLA, Cambridge, or the University of British Columbia. When students can’t get into a high-ranking institution but still want a degree, they will find many others, both national and international, that are happy to oblige them for a price. With a university degree almost fully commoditized, and with high status attached to the top schools, many students who dream of getting into elite institutions end up going downmarket from the top one hundred, to the top one thousand, and eventually to a low-ranking institution that will accept any international applicant with enough money to pay its fees.
To capitalize on the global opportunities, universities have expanded their international recruiting offices, sent recruiters to high schools in countries where there is a high demand, and participated in massive university and college fairs that attract thousands of eager—even desperate—students and their parents. Recruiting for the Dream Factories has become an industry its own right, with associations, specialized training, conferences, professional associations, marketing divisions, trade magazines, and the other accoutrements of a multi-billion-dollar a year industry. At the most aggressive universities, students define their interests by answering a brief questionnaire. Thanks to digital technology, each student then receives a personalized newsletter from the recruiting office that highlights campus activities, services, and personnel connected to the applicant’s preferences. Consider the situation from the university’s perspective. An international student attending a top American university might pay more than $50,000 a year in tuition and another $20,000 in other expenses, for each of the four to six years it takes successful students to complete a degree. A smart university would happily pay $10,000 or more for an accepted and confirmed applicant, and is therefore quite willing to spend aggressively on recruiters, agents, participation in recruiting fairs, outreach to parents, promotional material, and personalized websites.
Is college worth it? A couple of years ago the New York Times posed this question, quoting William J. Bennett, secretary of education under President Reagan, and Jeffrey Selingo, an editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education, both of whom believe the American college system is self-destructing. Bennett, a conservative, believes too many people are going to college, and Selingo says those who do go aren’t getting their money’s worth for the debt they are accumulating. He cited the 645-foot-long river-rafting feature in the “leisure pool” at Texas Tech to support his claim that students are going into debt for needless frills. The Times takes a more benign view: “… most colleges are filled with hard-working students and teachers. At underfunded, overcrowded community colleges, which enroll more than a third of the almost 18 million American undergraduates, there aren’t many leisure pools.”[23]
New technologies have permitted another route to the Dream Factories, albeit one that has not yet reached its potential. The Internet and digital course delivery have accelerated the pace of university growth, permitting the more prestigious institutions to reach students around the world, new institutional aspirants to carve out a market niche, and socially-aware universities to provide high-quality education to non-wealthy students worldwide. A decade ago, as enthusiasm for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) surged, promoters forecast the demise of brick-and-mortar universities (they were wrong) and a rapid shift to Internet-based courses and universities. On many campuses, residential students do enrol in online courses instead of rousing themselves from bed to take a regular class (at Canada’s most innovative university, the University of Waterloo, more than 80 percent of online course registrations are from on-campus students). Online and distance learning has taken off dramatically in the developing world, where most of the largest universities are Internet-based, allowing students who otherwise could not have aspired to university attendance to start their studies.
Rarely has a single dream been embraced so widely, so enthusiastically, and so uncritically, as that of the modern university. There was enough evidence, particularly in the life and work histories of the baby boomers, to “prove” that a university degree would unlock opportunity, careers, and lifelong stability. The closest historical parallel to the race to universities in energy, commitment, and personal investment is perhaps the monumental global migration boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which sent millions from Europe to seize land and opportunities in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Argentina South Africa, Rhodesia, and a handful of other countries or colonies. Access to free or cheap land was the global ladder to opportunity in the industrial age. A century later, at the end of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, universities have become the object of global dreams and aspirations.
Don’t underestimate the anxiety that underscores the attempt to gain access to a university. In January 2012, one person died in a stampede set off when students panicked about admission to the College of Johannesburg in South Africa. With more than ten thousand students vying for one of eight hundred spots, the assembled youth rioted. The conflict started when the government, seeking to respond to the inequities created by an unjust and unequal high school system, lowered the passing grades for math from 50 percent to 30 percent, instantly making thousands of new aspirants eligible for admission. Sbahle Mbambo, a young woman, was one of those desperate for a place. “Everyone in this country wants to be educated,” she said. “They want to be independent, and to get proper jobs.”[24] South Africa’s anxieties peaked again in October 2015 when planned tuition hikes sent tens of thousands of angry students, mostly black, to the streets to protest what they saw as the growing inaccessibility of a university education.
The metrics of this application process are quite remarkable. In Japan, students pay an application fee of up to ¥10,000 (or more than US$1,000) for many universities. In India, middle-class parents with talented children work tirelessly to get them accepted into the career-making IITs, among the hardest universities in the world to get into. The tiger mothers immortalized by Amy Chua devote much of their energy to ensuring their little treasures have their choice of the very best schools. Getting a young adult into Oxford or Cambridge typically requires careful attention to the elementary and secondary school that the children attend, for few graduates from mediocre high schools make it into a top British university. In country after country, getting into an elite institution is seen as a sure road to career success and personal wealth.
No one, however, does it quite like the Americans. The USA has the world’s most remarkable and diverse university system. Everyone knows about the elite Ivy League universities, the superb public research institutions (Wisconsin-Madison and UC-San Diego are among the best universities anywhere), and even the truly special liberal-arts colleges, like Wellesley, Bates, Lewis and Clark, and Reed. Many fewer people have ever heard of the vast array of mid-ranked institutions, from Bowling Green to the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, that provide top-flight research to their regions and a decent education to their students. Almost no one has heard of the large number of aggressively mediocre institutions that admit all comers, graduate only a small percentage of their students, and give them little of value while they are there. While we forebear to name the universities in this last category, they are often in the news for their high attrition rates, poor student-satisfaction results, and financial crises.
It’s