Degrees of separation

New York University Abu Dhabi's temporary campus on Hamdan Street.

The Great Brain Race offers an insightful examination of the development - and growing inequities - of the worldwide education system, writes John Gravios. The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities are Reshaping the World Ben Wildavsky Princeton University Press Dh100 In the year 1158, the Holy Roman Emperor issued a decree granting special privileges and protections to students traversing the empire to attend university. The first such institutions had just begun to flourish in Paris and Bologna, attracting scholars from across Europe. But when students at the University of Paris erupted into riots in 1229, the King of France disbanded the faculty for six years - and what became known as The Great Dispersion of French scholars ensued. Sensing an opportunity, King Henry III of England quickly recruited the homeless academics to British universities - a move we may now recognise, with the clarity of hindsight, as the first great play for market share in the global higher education sector.

As Ben Wildavsky recounts in his book The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities are Reshaping the World, dramatic shifts in the scholarly gravitational field have taken place throughout history. The latest such major reorientation came in the wake of the Second World War, when the centre of western academia shifted from Germany to the United States. Almost overnight, a new scholarly critical mass formed across the Atlantic, one that attracted the world's students like iron filings to a magnet. Before the war, only 10,000 foreigners were enrolled in US universities; by 1955, there were 36,000; by 1963, 75,000.

Last year, the number of foreigners studying in the United States stood at 672,000 - a new record. And yet, as Wildavsky attests, another profound shift in the world's academic market is already under way. By huge margins, more students and scholars are crossing borders than ever before. And though America just enrolled its largest-ever crop of foreign students, its worldwide share of them has been dropping significantly since the 1980s. The scholarly gravitational field is undergoing its own Great Dispersion; in higher education as in so many things, the world appears to be on its way to becoming multi-polar.

The scale of this surge in academic mobility registers in a dizzying set of indicators. In the past 10 years alone, the number of students leaving their home countries for university has increased by 57 per cent. The number of university branch campuses worldwide has increased by roughly the same margin in half that amount of time. Traditional routes of academic migration have been upset: China, long the world's largest exporter of young minds, now absorbs more students than it sends overseas.

The practice of research has been equally transformed. Just as it is often cheapest to manufacture goods in China, it is increasingly common for American universities to outsource laboratory research there. At the same time, more and more Chinese academics - who may have made their careers in Middle America - are packing their bags and returning home as universities there mature. Wildavsky does a fine job of giving contour to the diffuse and multifarious phenomena that comprise the ongoing globalisation of academia, within which he indentifies three central dynamics. First, institutions from the geographic strongholds of higher education - the United States, the UK, Australia, Canada - are expanding via satellite campuses into new territories in Asia and the Middle East. The most ambitious of these, if not the most typical, is probably New York University's effort to establish a fully fledged campus in Abu Dhabi, a project to which Wildavsky dedicates a great deal of attention. NYU Abu Dhabi aims to attract elite students from all over the world, even to draw them in large numbers from America. The more standard branch-campus model attempts to tap foreign demand at its source while establishing a western university's brand overseas.

The second hallmark of academic globalisation is the effort by nations outside the West to create their own "world-class universities", explicitly designed for the international playing field. The most ambitious of these projects is also in the Gulf - Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, which boasted one of the world's largest endowments from day one - but other sterling examples include the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and the National University of Singapore, all of which aim to attract international students and faculty.

For that to happen, of course, international students and faculty need to find out, somehow, that such universities are "world-class" - hence the rise of global academic rankings, the reputational stock markets of higher education. These have not only mediated the quest for status, they have accelerated it. "Despite the existence of over 17,000 higher education institutions worldwide," Wildavsky quotes an OECD report as saying, "there is now a near-obsession with the status and trajectory of the top 100."

The third facet of global higher education is one that has thrived in the shadow of that obsession with prestige. For-profit universities - which bear almost no resemblance to the brick and ivy ideal - have spread out across the developing world with an unbelievable agility and technological savvy. A campus might consist of a satellite dish tacked onto a schoolhouse in small-town Colombia, or a rented room in China. Tellingly, and perhaps depressingly, it is the for-profit academic entrepreneurs in Wildavsky's account who are most sensitive to the lower classes - which, after all, form the biggest market for their services. The business of conferring degrees on those "non-elite learners" generates profits to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars every year.

Wildavsky is forthright about his enthusiasm for what he calls a new "free trade in minds", and he is refreshingly sceptical of all the knee-jerk rhetoric purporting to warn that America and other western powers are "falling behind". ("Increasing knowledge is not a zero-sum game," he argues.) He is at his most easily compelling when he details the most pernicious absurdities of what he calls "academic protectionism" - which often takes the form of policies that refuse to recognise credentials from foreign universities.

And yet it does not seem quite fair to characterise the debate over global higher education - and its increasingly commercial imperatives - entirely as a dispute over "free trade" and "protectionism". Broadened access to university education and freedom of mobility are worthy goals, but they are not the sole modus operandi of today's global academic marketplace. Wildavsky is a fairly gentle critic of the downsides of higher education's new direction; he duly notes the "perverse incentives" that often stem from ranking systems; he dutifully registers the misgivings of those who would rather see education as a "public good" (though he does not really explore what they mean by that); and he admits that there will be both "winners and losers" in the sped-up, borderless future. But such concessions often come off sounding perfunctory. In Wildavsky's treatment, the objections to the various institutional changes that have trimmed the modern university's sails for the battle of global competition come across as incoherent barks, rather than as serious arguments about the structural forces at work in higher education.

It's not clear, for instance, that a commitment to academic freedom or tenure is a condition for success in the new global arena. In America, whose institutional DNA is still the most likely to replicate itself abroad, universities today stand accused of eating their young - of exploiting the graduate students who supply much of the university's labour, only to eject them with vanishingly little prospect of a tenure-track job upon granting them the credential of a PhD. Universities have become machines for extracting value from the people who flock to them either out of desire for prestige or for love of study. The rhetoric of global higher education, as opposed to that of public higher education, may promise more of the same, given its obsession with "brains", "minds", and "talent" - resources that can be monetised - rather than, say, people.

But what Wildavsky's account does suggest is that our idea of the public has too often failed us - that it has at best been unable to scale itself up to meet the full demand for university education or, at worst, has served as a mere mask for entrenched privilege. In much of the world, Wildavsky reports, it is the public universities that are most exclusive, with national entrance exams that demand months of hair-raising preparation. In places like Brazil, he writes, wealthy students who can afford years of private education are the ones who gain entrance to state universities, where their tuition is then generously subsidised by a nation of also-ran taxpayers. The great promise of higher education's global march is that more and more people left outside those walls will be able to earn a degree; the great tragedy is that they will be the ones who have to pay.

John Gravois is a senior editor at The Review.