Hosting international students became an industry in its own right. Australia declared international students to be worth AUS$16.3 billion in 2013–14.[18] Other countries, aided by bean-counting university organizations, spoke enthusiastically about the $7.7 billion Canadian sector,[19] the $22 billion brought into the United States,[20] and the £2.3 billion contributed to the United Kingdom’s economy every year.[21]
The situation seemed like a match made in heaven. Young people wanted to go to university. Their parents were willing to foot the bill to send them overseas. The receptor universities were happy to welcome them, with the elite institutions selecting some of the brightest (and wealthiest) students on the planet and the lower-ranked universities hoovering up thousands of full-fee-paying students, albeit often of lower academic standing. Governments bought in big time, welcoming the annual infusion of cash into the local economies. Few complained—and surprisingly little thought was given to the simple question of whether or not this massive expansion in university attendance was connected to the needs of the national and global economies.
Others saw commercial opportunities in the global preoccupation with the Dream Factories. A massive industry of agents grew up around the world, with specialists, some qualified and honest, others not, promising parents and students access to the best universities. No one really knows the balance between those with integrity and those who are simply eager for cash. Add to this the privately run housing units, immigration lawyers (it is not automatic that the students admitted to even a top university will get the appropriate visas in a timely fashion), travel agents, and the like who cluster around the international-student industry. Not surprisingly, fraudsters gathered. Recently Mark Zinny, an ex-Harvard teacher and “educational consultant,” was sentenced in Boston to five years in prison for scamming a Chinese family for $2 million in fees and bribes to get their sons into top prep schools and colleges. The Boston Globe commented that “the case calls attention to the dark side of a growing international admissions consulting industry, as more foreign families seek to send their students to elite US schools at any cost.”[22]
The private sector has also stepped in to compete with public institutions for fee-paying students. The for-profit companies engage at many levels in the educational process. Private secondary schools offer students from non-Western countries high-quality, internationally recognized diplomas that give them a leg up on students graduating from domestic high schools. There is a large global network of English-language training centres, most operating on a for-profit basis and many targeted at helping would-be international students pass their Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) or other language competency examination. (There is a much smaller industry associated with helping students improve their skills in German, Spanish, French, and Chinese.) China alone claims more than three hundred million people are studying English; Japan has millions taking English lessons. Private and public institutions in Western countries also offer pre-university English-language programs, primarily focused on university entrance, another lucrative sideline for the global education industry.
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
