"U.S. and Thai Perspectives on the United States in Asia and the Pacific"
C.S. Pattani Hotel
Thailand
16 June 2000

Presentation to the American Studies Seminar

From the American Century to the Education Century
By Dr. Allan E. Goodman
President and CEO, Institute of International Education

This is a particularly challenging lecture assignment because of the range of questions I have been asked to address. What is the perspective on the world that unites Americans? How compatible is that with the world of the 21st century? And what are the implications for educators and the government and business leaders they will teach in an era of globalization? Since the future is happening faster than any of us can imagine, it is also hard to draw lessons from the extraordinary changes of the past ten years.

But most of what made the last century America's no longer exists in this one. The large and leading-edge companies are increasingly global in terms of their ownership, management, and strategy. Half or more of all corporate profits last year by the firms that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average were made beyond U.S. borders. Innovation and entrepreneurship are turning out to be global phenomena, whereas for much of the last century these qualities were almost uniquely "made in the USA." And there is no singular challenge comparable to the rise of fascism or communism to which Americans feel unequivocally compelled to respond.

Turning Inward at the Turn of the Century

Despite Alexis De Tocqueville's forecast that by the 20th century the American and Russian empires would rule the world, global pre-eminence has not been an aspiration native to or deeply rooted in the American political landscape. Our frontier spirit stresses, instead, self-reliance and encourages unilateralism. At best, we entered the 20th century as a second tier power and one largely uninterested in the trappings of empire. And for fully half of it we only reluctantly engaged. The period from World War Two to the end of the Cold War era was unusual. It lasted longer than anyone thought it would. And had Americans been asked in 1945 if they were ready for more than 40 years of a new worldwide crusade against communism, the answer would have been a resounding "No!"

When the Cold War ended with the dismantling of the Berlin wall and the demise of the Soviet Union, we rushed to dis-engage. Foreign policy ceased to be an election-winning issue. And between 1989 and 1998, we reduced government spending on international affairs by fully 50% in real terms.

The world, however, remained a dangerous place.

There were more wars in the post-Cold War period than during it, and internal conflicts erupted virtually everywhere that appeared only indirectly linked to American interests. But because so many of the post-Cold War era problems seem so intractable, the view that America should limit its role and reach in world affairs is gaining intellectual ground. As George Kennan recently put it, "What we ought to do at this point is to try to cut ourselves down to size in the dreams and aspirations we direct to our possibilities for world leadership." His argument carries considerable weight in the months running up to an American presidential election because it is also about the primacy of domestic priorities. Kennan says that we should accept limits precisely because "We have serious problems within our society these days, and it sometimes seems to me that the best help we could give to others would be to allow them to observe that we are now confronting those problems with a bit more imagination, courage, and resolve than has been apparent in the recent past." This perspective is more consistent with American history and the founding fathers' belief that a "New World Order" would be created best by what America accomplished at home rather than what we promoted abroad.

So as the end of the 20th century approached, many Americans were hoping that the world would be called something else

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 generalizations about 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.

The collapse of the Thai Baht in July of 1997, and the devaluation of most of the rest of the Asian currencies shortly thereafter plunged the region into a deep recession. Like a bolt of summer lightning that illuminates the entire landscape, the ensuing crisis revealed socio-economic fault lines that changed the way most political scientists thought about the powerhouse economies of Asia, China's capacity to join the world trading system, Japan's debt (which within the decade of the 1990s climbed from less than half to nearly three times the size of its GNP), and the likelihood that the source of a new world order would emerge from the nations that border the Pacific Ocean.

Consequently, 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. 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. 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.

The Role for Education

What are the implications for our profession and our institutions as we enter the 21st century? Educational exchange and the internationalization of our campuses are the prime ways to assure that young people learn to think and work on a truly global basis. Exchange also teaches cooperation. The more that the Americans headed for "foreign service" in the public but especially also in the private sector have the chance to study and work abroad, the more likely they are to embrace international cooperation as a tool of choice in foreign policy.

We are finding, however, that most higher education systems are not really very open to the world.

Of the 193 sovereign states now in existence, in 170 of them foreign students make up less than one percent of university enrollment. Even the United States, which annually receives the highest number of foreign students in the world (nearly 500,000) is not very international; foreign students make up just over three percent of higher education enrollments here. Germany, France, Norway and Syria have proportions twice as large. And the top three countries in terms of foreign students as a percentage of university enrollment are among the world's smallest states: Lebanon (22%), Switzerland (17%), and Belgium (11%).

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, only seven percent study a modern foreign language once they actually get to college. And while European youth may do better at getting passports, European Commission researchers calculate that only two percent of college students in the EU study in another country.

What's Driving What's Ahead?

More persons will attend colleges and universities in this century than in all of human history.

This singular fact will do more to change the nature of world politics, the map of the post-modern world, and the structure of the international system than practically anything else I can envision. 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 present era the American Century. The scale of what's ahead will thus re-shape our world, and empower a vast global citizenry. They, in turn, will change what governments as well as companies do.

That is why I think the 21st century will be called the Education Century.

The most critical success factor for nations as they enter the 21st century will be people whose minds are open to the world. This can only happen, as the late Senator Fulbright observed, through international education because "it can turn nations into people and contribute as no other form of communication can to the humanizing of international relations."

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 world's top MBA programs now stress their international character, courses, and student bodies, for example.

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 the established universities of Europe. Education ministries will be unable to afford to build campuses along traditional lines or wait long enough for 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 macro and micro economics, 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 abroad to open their societies to such knowledge. The delivery of higher education should thus become as much a measure of government effectiveness as security, safe water, and life expectancy.

What We Are Aiming to Create

When the present headquarters of the IIE was built at United Nations Plaza the U.S. Permanent Representative to the UN was Adlai Stevenson and he gave the dedication lecture. He was, throughout his career, a visionary voice for the value of education. His words then still explain much about why we work on internationalizing our institutions and what that can achieve: " . . . education is . . . the process of acquiring knowledge and then communicating it, so that, generation by generation, a great deposit of shared understanding is accumulated, a universal city of the mind arises, insight by insight, discovery by discovery. And of that city we are all enfranchised citizens."

Programs and institutions 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.