to country, but there is a common goal: to ensure success in life by getting into a top university. In Japan, students work themselves into exhaustion studying for nation-wide high school–leaving examinations. When the results are posted (and in Japan they are posted publicly), careers and lives are made or blighted, because the tests determine which students get into the best schools and which ones are destined for the factory floor. The winners in Britain’s endless educational class wars emerge from their A-level tests, heading for the top schools, while the losers go on to less prestigious institutions or directly into the low-paid workforce. American parents hire advisors, letter-writers, and test coaches to help their offspring work through the maze of college and university admission procedures. In China, where until recently only 2 percent of high school graduates got into a domestic university, wealthy parents set aside up to $200,000 to give their child a shot at completing a four-year degree overseas. South African students, particularly black youngsters struggling to overcome the legacy of apartheid, are desperate to get into an institute of higher learning.
In most African nations, where only a minority gets to go to high school and only a fraction of these have the chance to go to university, the pursuit of a post-secondary education is usually a distant dream, dependent on personal connections. Harvard accepts about 7 percent of those who apply, but that is almost an open-entry institution compared to the situation in India. Indian students compete through rigorous examinations for a place in the Indian Institutes of Technology, campuses with such intense competition for entry that they make the admissions standards at Harvard and Oxford look easy in comparison. In 2012, half a million people wrote the national IIT entrance exam, and the success rate was 2 percent.[8] At Nanjing University of China, one of the top schools in an education-hungry nation, fewer than 1 percent of applicants are accepted, making it even tougher to get into than the IITs.
Ever wonder why people attach a premium to top institutions? The race to get in is a key reason. At many of the world’s universities, high school graduation and the ability to pay tuition is sufficient for entry. Take it for granted that students are not banging down the doors to get into the University of Kinshasa, currently ranked 5,959th in the world (but top of the mountain in the Congo). Not surprisingly, parents who want their children to get into the top institutions invest heavily in entrance-examination preparation and pre-testing exercises. In contrast, South Korea and Taiwan, like the United States, have places for almost every high school graduate; there is intense competition for a handful of elite schools, but it’s easy to get into one of the public and private universities in the country. Germany, in contrast, identifies academic potential early on, moving high-quality students into academic streams in their early teens and herding the less bookish into technical and trades programs.
This being the age of universities, however, there are always workarounds. Cannot get into the University of Chicago law school? Go to the University of Windsor, not so far away in Canada and less than a quarter the cost. Turned down for medical school at USC or UCLA? Why not try the University of Guadalajara, which uses the same curriculum and many of the same instructors? Cannot get into a prime law school in the United Kingdom or Canada? The private Bond University—one of the few places named after a convicted felon—offers internationally transportable law degrees. One of the simple truths of this age is that all universities are not created equal and that students in pursuit of a specific credential can often find it—for a price—somewhere in the world.
But universities have some tricks up their sleeves, particularly when governments insist on accessibility as a prime value. Some countries—the Netherlands and Portugal being good examples—believe that accessibility to university is as much of a right as high school attendance. Institutions cope with this intellectually irrational proposition by making a simple point: admission is not a guarantee of graduation. So institutions and programs in high demand among entering students—engineering, design, digital media, and other market-ready programs are currently popular—admit hundreds and hundreds of students, then use the first-year experience to cull the number to a manageable level. Second-year cohorts, entrance to which is closely guarded by program directors, might be limited to 10 percent or fewer of the first-year students. Students who fail to meet the threshold—and clearly they are numbered in the many hundreds—are redirected to lower-demand (and often lower-quality) programs. If the university does not need the extra bodies to cover institutional costs, having sucked government grants and often tuition fees from the first-year students, they can simply let the students leave the university.
The success of colleges and universities in North America has produced many global imitators over the past three decades. While countries with strong resource economies lagged behind—largely because of the continuation of high-wage/low-skill work—nation after nation invested in the rapid expansion of its college and university system. The growth in the wealthier nations was dramatic, building off an institutional base that, in some quarters, was hundreds of years old.
But consider what has occurred at the same time in the developing world. The colonial powers created universities in their overseas possessions, usually training the children of elite families to take their place in the colonial business and governance systems and sending the best of them back to institutions in the mother country. These former colonies, struggling to adjust to industrial competition and globalization, have seized on advanced education as a means of achieving individual and collective prosperity. With many of these countries coping with widespread poverty, serious infrastructure challenges, and limited government resources, distance-education systems and online educational delivery have provided a means of extending advanced education to villages and towns outside of the capital cities. The result has been a massive global increase in the total number of universities and university students.
This expansion has been fraught with irony and contradiction. The colonial powers financed the early stages of the system and trained many faculty and staff members who subsequently found work in developing world institutions. Industrial-world philanthropy, often through global governance organizations such as the United Nations, UNESCO, the World Bank, and private donors, provided further assistance to the international effort. When the system worked—and there were many individual and institutional success stories among a global university system marked by serious inconsistencies in standards and effectiveness—these colleges and universities converted bright young students into globally competitive graduates. To put it bluntly, the leading universities in the leading industrial nations trained their competitors, transferring a significant portion of the educational advantage enjoyed by the West to the emerging economies. India is an excellent example of this process in action. This act of educational philanthropy improved the global economy, strengthening the training in these countries through lifelong commercial and professional contacts with their graduates. Overall, the primary impact was to improve their economic prospects dramatically.
At the individual level, the growing universities of India, China, and other countries are classic Dream Factories, converting potential into achievement and opportunity into personal success, though not necessarily at home. Africa, in recent years, has seen upwards of thirty-five thousand of its best-trained graduates leave the continent each year for further study in first-world institutions or jobs in wealthier countries. Turkey has, over the past decade, financed a ferocious expansion of its university system, focusing largely on engineering and technology, predicated on the belief that these graduates will find work in the European Union, send money home, and eventually return to bolster the country’s economy. Worldwide, more than 4.5 million students are enrolled in university-level education outside their home country, a number that is predicted to rise to 8 million by 2025.[9] The country with the highest percentage of international students studying in its universities is, perhaps surprisingly, Australia—surprising until one thinks of its geographical location.
One of the imperatives behind studying overseas is the idea, particularly strong in China, that young graduates would either enjoy a decided employment advantage when they returned home, or would be able to gain a working visa that could lead to permanent residency in the country of their education. Nations such as Canada, the United States, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom have for several decades capitalized
