Remarks at International House
University of California, Davis
13 February 2001

By Dr. Allan E. Goodman
President and CEO, Institute of International Education

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. And at the university where I served as a dean before coming to the Institute, I just learned that a grand total of 6 out of some 350 entering students to the School of Foreign Service passed infamous "map of the modern world" examination, which is a graduation requirement. Last year, the total that passed the exam was 4.

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 (which we publish with support from the Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs), half of the 500,000 foreign students that study here do so in only 100 institutions. Nation-wide, international students account for only about 3 percent of total enrollment. 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 college 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 and more 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 civilizing about that, too. Yet most Americans -- less than 1 percent, in fact, of all enrolled in college -- study abroad. And only 17 percent of all Americans even have a passport.

Civilization in the sense of which I am speaking about it is still not reaching American students today. And, despite the fact that many colleges and universities now have an aspiration to be full players in this era of globalization in their mission statement, there is little prospect that American students' stunningly limited contact with the world and opportunity for immersion in another culture will increase substantially without dramatic action.

Some trend lines, in fact, are even pointing in the wrong direction. According to a new report on "Internationalization of U.S. Higher Education," undertaken by the American Council on Education as part of a Ford Foundation project, for example, the number of students enrolled in foreign language courses has declined by fifty percent since the high-water mark of 16% in the 1960s. In the same time period, the number of colleges and universities that required the study of a foreign language for admission also declined from one-third to one-fifth. In the sixties (a decade which Professor Bloom mainly deplores), almost 90 percent of the 4-year colleges in the United States had a language requirement for graduation. Today the figure is under 60 percent and well under 10 percent for those who actually require the student to take college level courses rather than pass a proficiency exam. This is, perhaps, a reflection of trends in the faculty where, as a number of reports have found, "United States scholars are less likely than most other world scholars to regard international activity as important. They are the least likely to work abroad, collaborate with scholars abroad, or express interest in literature from abroad."

It is ironic that the isolation of the American student is occurring at a time when education is on the verge of becoming a global commodity.

Last year, more than 58,000 college and university courses in the United States were provided over the Internet. Some were quite expensive. But most were virtually free, and ranged from basic math to brain surgery. The real cost of these courses, it turns out, is the equipment to run them. So in that sense education is not universal.

But like so many of the goods that now traverse the world electronically and without regard to borders, the educational material contained in these courses is available globally.

What does this mean?

Education, of course, involves more than just taking courses. In most advanced industrial societies, it is a process of achieving adulthood (and gaining time and space apart from those who control "home") as well as credentials. It is the experience of being taught and on occasion mentored by another person who has specialized knowledge but who is also a part of a vocation that attracts people with the capacity to see students as what they can become.

At least that is what I used to think. What I have described in the previous paragraph is, in fact, "university life." Education -- the process by which one is drawn out of oneself -- is but a part of that experience. It can happen outside the campus and in ways that do not involve the traditional paradigm. That is what the Internet makes possible. And borderless.

And just in time.

According to the research department at IIE, sometime between 2020 and 2035, more people will be ready for post-secondary education than went to university in all of human history. And as the President of the World Bank observed recently, we are heading into "a world where the communications revolution holds out the promise of universal access to knowledge."

The conjunction of these two dynamics is not entirely good news. At present, some 88 million students are enrolled in post-secondary educational institutions. Most universities are already operating at full capacity and those systems that have the resources to grow may well be located in the wrong place. American and European universities enroll more than half of all students but two thirds of the world's college-age population lives elsewhere. Only 7 percent of China's college age population has been able to find a seat in Chinese universities, and unfortunately there are fewer seats in all of that country's universities than there are in California. Qualified applicants already outnumber the seats available just about everywhere; but in many developing countries, the ratio is 60:1. Moreover, no country appears to have the resources to build campuses and train professors fast enough to meet demand.

The problem is that by 2010, the worldwide demand for higher education will increase to well over 100 million persons, according to a recent study by the British government. And by 2025, this number could be as high as 150 million.

Responding to this level of demand will require higher education systems everywhere to adopt a new paradigm. This will involve not only making it possible for more people to "go to college" in the traditional sense, but also for many more of them to receive the equivalent of a college education by connecting to the Internet. As that happens, according to Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers, "education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make e-mail usage look like a rounding error."