The Globalization of Higher Education

Niall Ferguson, writing in the LA Times, surveys the global expansion of institutions of higher education and speculates on its effect. He writes:

It was the British novelist Kingsley Amis who prophesied that expanding universities would lower standards. At a time of year when many students are getting ready for college, it's appropriate to ask if he was right.

The opening up of higher education is a global phenomenon. Forty-five years ago, when Amis made his prediction, just 5% of British students entered higher education. Today it's closer to 45%. And college entry rates are even higher in the United States. In 1960, 45% of high school graduates enrolled in college. Now it's 65%.

Similar expansion has been going on all over the developed world and, at breakneck speed, in Asia. All told, the world has something in the region of 100 million students. So if Amis was right, and more does mean worse, then the deterioration of higher education should be occurring on a global scale.

Of course, it isn't. Instead, what is occurring is an intensification of the competition among the world's universities.

In this competition Ferguson finds that the US does very, very well in areas where money buys quality, such as top-end research. But that it does less well in other, less cost-intensive activities. The US university system, for instance, no longer functions to generate social mobility as well as it once did. The main reason for this decline, though, would seem to lie more with the public school system which no longer prepares poor students adequately for higher education than with the universities themselves.

Finally, Ferguson notes that the US is beginning to lose out to institutions in other countries in the competition for top students. In part this is due to the prohibitive cost of US university educations, but it also reflects new discriminatory policies instituted by the INS and, I might add, by America's top universities themelves.

It's an interesting piece. Read it here.

Ralph Luker over at Cliopatria notes that Ferguson's LA Times article is essentially the same article he published [and was paid for] by the Telegraph the previous day [not that there's anything wrong with that]. It must be nice to get two paychecks for one article. Luker also notes that Ferguson has been able to wangle multiple and simultaneous academic appointments.

Niall Ferguson informs us that his starship is "the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is a resident faculty member of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. He is also a Senior Reseach Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University." He has an additional affiliation with the Harvard Business School. We're told that he'll be on sabbatical leave for the fall of 2005. I assume that means that he'll be on leave from all five institutions.

He even has a store where you can buy Ferguson knicknacks.

Talk about academic entreprenurship!

Nice catch, Ralph!

Read the whole article here.