To the insistent strains of a romantic guitar rising on the soundtrack, a young Asian couple exchange passionate kisses in a hot tub. The camera pulls back, revealing a decidedly disapproving older man and woman scowling amid the bubbles, followed by the punch line to this viral internet video sensation aimed at students considering overseas study: “Get further away from your parents. Study in New Zealand.”
Welcome to the great education race, a scramble for students, professors, prestige and prosperity that is changing the face of university education around the world.
For decades the United States attracted more than a quarter of all foreign students in college or graduate education. Recently that has begun to change. While the continuing boom in study overseas — an explosion largely unaffected by the economic downturn — means that the number of foreign students going to the US has continued to grow, the US share of the foreign student market has fallen to just 18.7 per cent, according to the most recent report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Meanwhile countries like Australia, Russia and New Zealand have all seen their share of the market rise sharply.
But behind the numbers and the winners and losers lies a more complex story of a rapidly changing international landscape in which the old pattern of a ‘brain drain,’ in which rich countries skim off the talent from the rest of the world, is giving way to a ‘brain exchange,’ in which students complete part of their education at home and part abroad, often working overseas as well before ultimately returning home.
“Increasingly the difference is that the traffic works both ways,” said Jamil Salmi, an official who follows education issues at the World Bank. “In the past you had a clear hierarchy of sending and receiving countries. Now the flows are more complex, going in many directions.”
In Europe, students have been traveling abroad to study since the Middle Ages, when universities in Paris, Bologna, Italy, and Salamanca, Spain, drew students from across the continent, as did Oxford and Cambridge in England.
In more recent times the US and Britain have long been dominant. “Partly because of quality,” said Andreas Schleicher, head of the analysis in the education directorate at the OECD. “But also because they were the first movers in this market. Now there is quite a lot of competition.”
According to Ben Wildavsky, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, international higher education is subject to “the same forces of globalisation that have shaken up” every other sector of economy. In his book ‘The Great Brain Race’, Wildavsky says that rather than fear this growing “free trade in minds,” Americans should welcome it. “We shouldn’t view this as a zero-sum game. As long as the pie is getting bigger, and there is continued growth in student mobility worldwide, that can only be good for everyone,” Wildavsky said.
But Stuart Tannock, a Canadian-born, Stanford-educated academic now teaching at the University of Cardiff, worries that the global competition for talent still “works as a glorified form of poaching: states seek to secure the labour of educated individuals for whose education they have not had to pay. As such, the global talent war is a way to externalise costs, cut taxes and shrink the public sector, while avoiding any immediate consequences of declining investment in the domestic educational infrastructure.”
Though there may be disagreement on the implications, the scale of the global traffic is beyond dispute: depending on how you count, there are currently between 2.5 and 3 million foreign students (some countries count only foreign citizens who stay for longer than a year). By 2025 that figure is expected to reach 8 million.
Push factors
Salmi cites both “push factors — things that make you decide to leave your own country — and pull factors” behind the projected growth. “Push factors could be students aren’t happy with the quality of instruction on offer at home — or perhaps they just didn’t find a place,” he said. “For example, medical education is very selective in Germany. So many German students go to Austria.”
Salmi listed “prestige, language of instruction, student aid package and access to visas” as factors that ‘pull’ students toward certain receiving countries. Doctoral students in New Zealand pay the same tuition as local students. But tuition costs can cut both ways. “I was advising the Irish government last year.” Currently students from EU countries pay no tuition in Irish universities. “They plan to introduce tuition fees — but at half the level of fees in the UK, so they would still retain a strong competitive advantage,” he said.
He cautioned: “You have to be careful how you play this game. High tuition costs can also be a push factor. My own kids went to Canada instead of the US. They’re studying at the University of Toronto; a comparable university in the US would cost three times as much.”
Rising prosperity is another contributor to what Wildavsky calls “the globalisation of knowledge.” He points to “China and South Korea, who are trying very hard to build world-class universities. Those are both countries that traditionally sent a lot of students to the US. And they still do.”
But thanks in part to massive government investment in elite institutions like Tsinghua University in Beijing and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, “China now receives more foreign students than they send overseas,” Wildavsky said.
A different route has been taken by Malaysia, where the growth in graduate and professional education has been led by the business community. Multimedia University was built by the Malaysian telephone company, while Universiti Teknologi Petronas was originally a wholly owned subsidiary of the national oil company. “Today these schools attract not just Malaysian students but students from all over south Asia, the Arab world — even European students,” Salmi said.
There are immediate economic benefits to the winners in this global competition. “Full-pay students also make a significant contribution to a country’s educational bottom line,” said Wildavsky. Education is now Australia’s third-largest export, directly behind coal and iron ore. But in the long term, Wildavsky said, the spread of high-quality education, and the creation of new knowledge, should benefit everyone. “Chinese research may well provide the material for innovation by American entrepreneurs — or those from other nations,” he said.
Schleicher of the OECD argues that the growth of distance learning will bring still greater change — and greater potential benefits. “At the moment we are still shipping students around the world. The real competition will come — and the real savings — with online programmes, where you are moving not students around but content around,” said Schleicher. When that happens, and as better measures of educational quality become available, newer providers may suddenly become more attractive: “You always have a few students who want to go to Harvard or Oxford,” he said. “But China has become a huge provider of high-quality graduate education. In the 1950s and 1960s we laughed about Japanese cars because they were cheap. Now they are cheap and good.”