Of the 193 sovereign states now in existence, in 170 of them foreign students make up less than one percent of university enrollment. Even for the United States, which annually receives the highest number of foreign students in the world (over 500,000) foreign students make up less than four percent of higher education enrollments. Germany and France have proportions twice as large. And the top three countries in terms of international students as a percentage of university enrollment are among the world's smallest in population states: Switzerland (16%), Australia (13%), and Austria (12%).
Most university students do not study aboard.
Less than one percent of all American citizens enrolled in colleges and universities do so. And I estimate that no more than five percent even enter college with a passport. And despite the fact that nearly three-quarters of all college-bound seniors have studied foreign language while in high school, less than ten percent study a modern foreign language once they actually get to college.
The good news is that the picture will change substantially. The focus of this talk is on why and what it means for those of us already engaged in internationalizing the campus.
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Asian Century
Prior to 1997, one of the most hotly-debated topics in academic as well as governmental circles in America as well as Asia was the issue of the "clash of civilizations," a thesis advanced by my mentor Professor Samuel P. Huntington. He was looking for a way to make sense out of the post-Cold War era and to predict its disorders. He ran into a maelstrom of criticism over his characterization of societal norms and cultural value systems. His critics in Asia especially saw Huntington's analysis of Confucianism as anti-individualistic and tolerant of authoritarianism as evidence of a plot to deny Asia nothing less than the future. The perceived U.S. government policies that flowed from Huntington's approach, moreover, were seen as the equivalent of a form of economic containment aimed at thwarting the so-called Asian miracle and a last-ditch effort by a jealous West to deny Asia its rightful place as owner of the 21st century.
You don't hear much talk about the Asian century these days and recently the feature story in Business Week was entitled "The Atlantic Century?" I do not think that this is likely to happen either.
Instead we are going to see a new map of the post-modern world emerge as the international system "right-sizes." In just ten years, the international system has increased the number of countries in it by 20; population is growing at the rate of 90 million a year, more than twice what the growth rate was just a decade ago, suggesting that even more new countries may lie ahead. In the process, what constitutes a country and how it is held together is changing. And information and ideas -- the great reserve currencies of the educator's world -- flow so readily across borders, languages, regions, and cultures that regions of many countries conduct foreign political and commercial relationships with regions of other countries in ways that the central government can barely monitor and no longer effectively control.
The conjunction of the end of the Cold War, the advent of globalization, and the Asian currency crisis has so far changed the nature of international relations faster than our ability to understand it in theoretical terms. In fact, and in virtually every issue of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy magazines these days, we are engaged in a vigorous but unresolved debate about what the present era is all about. So far, all we can agree on is what it is not -- e.g., not the Cold War, not bipolar, not a system of world politics driven only by nations, and not one where ideology appears to matter very much. Consequently, we have no reliable guide to gauging the impact of ideas and the various forms of power or even of nations when they possess large supplies of both. So far, the spirit of the era is best-captured by Vaclav Havel: "this is an age in which everything is possible and nothing is certain."
The best any of us can say is that there are forces at work which we only imperfectly understand but which are changing the world of the educator just as surely as they are changing the space inhabited by diplomats and businesspeople.
What's Driving What's Ahead?
More persons will attend colleges and universities in the 21st century than in all of human history.
This singular fact will change the nature of world politics, the map of the post-modern world, and the structure of the international system because power will be diffused across cultures as well as countries. And since most of the capacity to meet this demand will probably be built in countries other than the United States, developments in higher education will affect America's place in the world just as surely as it did in contributing to what made the 20th century the American Century.
The most critical success factor for nations as they enter the 21st century will be people whose minds are open to the world. In fact, more governments than ever before are getting into the business of promoting educational exchange and attracting foreign students. The U.S. Department of Commerce considers the foreign students studying in America an export of services valued at more than $13 billion annually. And for many countries, gaining market share of such an industry is becoming a national priority. For example, British Prime Minister Tony Blair launched a campaign to increase the number of international students in the U.K. by 75,000. His stated goal is "to have 25 percent of the global market share of higher education students." Similar initiatives have been announced by the governments of France, Germany, Japan, and Australia.
In the coming century, more students will want international educational opportunities as part of their preparation for careers in business as well as the public sector. Top corporate and government leaders are telling us that their "high performers" are going to need to come to them already equipped to think and work on a global basis. This will change the hiring paradigm, as well as the content of many professional education programs. Many of the nation's top MBA programs now stress their international character, courses, and student bodies, for example. When I think about a new paradigm in American higher education, therefore, I envision a future in which government may no longer be the prime funder of international educational exchange opportunities and where the venue is both the university campus and the workplace.
Responding to the demands for access to higher education in other countries will also require out-of-the-box thinking. We cannot possibly accommodate all the qualified students from China and India that will be ready for college in the next decade, nor is there space for them in this hemisphere or in all of Europe. Education ministries will be unable to afford to build campuses along traditional lines or wait for all enough teachers to be trained. What needs to be transferred at a very rapid rate is the knowledge of how things (such as economies, governments, and machines) work and how they can be applied to improve human society. We do this now via the Internet to bake bread, increase crop harvests, teach surgery, open historical archives, and manufacture simple as well as highly complex machines. The contents of a basic college education already exist in cyberspace. What needs to be created is the political will among education ministries and institutions to open their societies to new forms of knowledge delivery.
And What We May Find
Now that the first-ever International Education Week is behind us, it is appropriate to reflect on how open (or not) Americans are to the world. Since seventy-five percent of those recently polled by the Gallup organization could not locate the Persian Gulf, fifty percent failed to locate South Africa, and twenty-five percent could not identify the Pacific Ocean, the news is not encouraging.
Professor Allan Bloom holds the university -- and the forces of insulation and isolation at play within it -- directly responsible.
While the United States is the number one destination of students from other countries, according to the Institute's "Open Doors 2000" report, half of the 500,000 foreign students that study here do so in only 100 institutions. Nation-wide, international students account for only a small fraction of total enrollment, as I mentioned before. This means that most Americans are in school with other Americans and that in most classrooms there is no international or intercultural perspective. What is missing is what Professor Bloom said was so precious about a student's intellectual space and time: "These are charmed years when he can, if he so chooses, become anything he wishes and when he has the opportunity to survey his alternatives, not merely those current in his time or provided by careers, but those available to him as a human being. The importance of these years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization's only chance to get to him."
I have always been haunted by that last sentence.
Civilization comes in many forms, not just in the books of literature and philosophy that Professor Bloom rightly reveres. The encounter in a seminar discussion or in a research task force an American might have with a foreign student introduces not only different ways of working on and solving a problem but also entirely different ways of thinking. Such interaction has the capacity to introduce the idea that civilization matters and that there may be more than one of them at work in the world. I also know that no one who studies abroad remains unchanged by the experience. Part of the change that occurs is the widening of a person's intellectual horizons and a dissolving of borders and boundaries. As the late Senator J. William Fulbright put it, "nations are transformed into people." There is something profoundly civilizational about that, too.
Programs that promote the international exchange of people and ideas are the intellectual power lines and thoroughfares of the future. In my view, they are also the surest way of making the world a less dangerous place.
