The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World

  • Ben Wildavsky
Princeton University Press: 2010. 248 pp. $26.95, £18.95 978-0-691-14689-8 | ISBN: 978-0-691-14689-8

Globalization is rapidly changing both the way universities operate and the idea of what a university is. In particular, there is increasing worldwide competition for the best students and scholars, and an expanding global market for educational credentials. In The Great Brain Race, journalist Ben Wildavsky, a former education editor of the U.S. News and World Report college rankings, argues that this is as an opportunity rather than a threat and urges universities to embrace globalization “not with fear but with a sense of possibility”.

Wildavsky examines five aspects of globalization in higher education: the increasing mobility of students and scholars across international borders; the establishment of university branch campuses in foreign countries; the race to build world-class research institutions focusing on science and technology; the proliferation of global college rankings; and the growth of for-profit education service providers that compete with traditional universities for students, faculty and revenue. Higher education, he observes, “has become a form of international trade”, a global marketplace advancing a “free trade in minds”.

Wildavsky decries all forms of “protectionism” in higher education, such as policies that prioritize the admission of students from an institution's home country, and opposes affirmative-action programmes, such as India's 'reservation' system for 'scheduled castes'. He endorses instead a meritocratic system in higher education. He admits that most educational shoppers in today's global supermarket of universities come from elite families, but insists that, over time, increasing mobility will “undermine rather than reinforce elites based on inherited privilege and political pull”.

That the forces of globalization will profoundly shape the future of higher education cannot be ignored.

The scope of change in global higher education is remarkable. Ventures such as the state-of-the-art King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, India's rising Institutes of Technology, China's esteemed 'C9 League' of its nine top universities and Singapore's bid to become an international knowledge hub have all helped to make higher education a fast-changing, fiercely competitive global enterprise. Wildavsky argues that only the fittest will survive.

He tells an engaging story about the ways in which global universities are “reshaping the world” but downplays a key cause of current entrepreneurial trends in US higher education: decreasing public investment. University presidents, faculty senate members and professors have all spoken of the urgent need for their institutions to generate revenue from overseas to fill the funding gap. Wildavsky omits to say how reduced state investment is driving the globalization strategies of US universities compared with their equivalents in countries that are increasing public support.

Wildavsky's book shows how globalization has gone hand in hand with the de facto privatization of US universities. Nearly every aspect of the university has been commodified. The enrolment of international students is now factored into a global “balance of trade” in tuition revenues. A similar calculus drives the recruitment of star faculty and the intellectual property they generate. Knowledge is a public good, but Wildavsky demonstrates that it is also a private good and that cash-strapped universities may end up compromising other values, such as the principles of non-discrimination or academic freedom, in a global quest to “fill the budget hole”.

Comparing global universities to multinational corporations, Wildavsky traces their feverish pursuit of world-class status as measured by global rankings. He delights in pointing out the power of these rankings, despite their well-known limitations, such as their reliance on citation indexes that marginalize some fields of scholarship. Rankings, he says, offer “consumer information” to help parents and governments make “apples-to-apples, cross-border comparisons of educational quality” — although he stops short of showing exactly how rankings measure quality.

Wildavsky's style is gripping and urgent. Although he exaggerates the “irrelevance” of national boundaries in higher education — visa restrictions, patent laws and constraints on security-related research all prove the continued relevance of borders in a knowledge economy — his point that the forces of globalization will profoundly shape the future of higher education cannot be ignored. Not everyone will share Wildavsky's faith that a “free trade in minds” will lead to equitable, or economically beneficial, outcomes. However, we must all grapple with his view that knowledge is a commodity, and universities, if they wish to survive, must treat it as such.