Speech at the IIENetwork Higher Education Research Symposium
Sponsored by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation
Khassandhra, Greece
11 October 2002

By Dr. Allan E. Goodman, President and CEO
INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION

Sometime between now and 2025, more people will be attending institutions of higher education than graduated from them in all of human history. Since, as I will illustrate in a moment, it is inconceivable to imagine a world in which existing universities and the resources on which they draw can meet the demand ahead, education is going to have to get a lot more international. It is an age that Homer would have celebrated. Odysseus, after all, was perhaps the first international student and drew from that epic experience so many fundamental lessons for living in a globalized world.

Homer would also have relished the challenge of opening minds to the world. As we know from his writing, it was not easy then and is not easy now.

Like other dimensions of globalization, the impact on education has also been uneven. And while knowledge and ideas now flow freely across most borders, education officials in some cultures have been among the most resistant to the implications that this reality has on what is being taught or how access can be enhanced. As we have been reminded recently in the news stories recounting the appalling content of text books in schools throughout the Islamic world, despite globalization it is still possible for curricula to preach hatred and distort the most basic facts of history. Even in an advanced society like Japan, education officials have been unable to come to terms with the task of correcting text books that have been used for decades and which deal inaccurately with events leading up to and during World War Two. And recent visa and border control restrictions are making it increasingly difficult for students and scholars from some countries to undertake studies and consultations in cultures beyond their own.

The world thus faces the prospect of an education divide as profound as the digital divide. Not only do many countries' higher education institutions lack the resources to teach about globalization, most also face acute and rapidly growing shortages of teachers at a time of rapidly rising demand. In the OECD countries, nearly 90% of the school-age population cohorts are enrolled in primary, secondary and post-secondary education. For the developing countries, the total is under 60%. And for the least developed countries, the number is well below 40%.

Access to a university education in the world's most populous developing countries is an opportunity that few now have and one which will become increasingly scarce as the numbers of young people increase and complete secondary education. In China last year, some 64 million high school students passed the examinations required for entry into a university. Less than 1% will actually find a seat. India is able to accommodate only 8 million students (about 3% of its total population) in all of its higher education institutions today. Even if this proportion does not change over the next decades, by 2050 these same institutions will have to find room for 50 million students on an annual basis. Cairo University now enrolls 250,000 students at a campus and with a faculty base designed for 50,000. In Brazil, for every seat now available in higher educational institutions, there are over 60 qualified aspirants. In sub-Saharan Africa, where there is an acute shortage of both seats and teachers, World Health officials estimate that the mortality associated with the continent's HIV/AIDS epidemic will result 40% fewer professors by the end of this decade.

Due to the nature and demands on academic and ministry of education CEOs, there are hardly any opportunities for top leaders in higher education to have a dialogue across cultures and about such issues as what a person educated for life in a global era should study, where spare capacity exists, or how the knowledge essential to promoting mutual understanding, tolerance, and cooperation in a globalized world can best be delivered in the face of the demographics and shortages mentioned above.

Thanks to the generosity and vision of the Trustees of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, this conference is one of the first to provide a genuine international and intercultural dialogue on a set of issues that will shape the 21st Century. It is a major example of how the philanthropy of international business leaders can have an impact on education. Gifts of this type in such an age as ours promise to be far more profound than those of the last century which built buildings, filled libraries, and established professorships all of which tied people to a campus instead of encouraging them to set sail, as the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote in his Ulysses,

"To Follow knowledge, like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought."

and in the process "seek a newer world." That world, incidentally, as the final chapter of "The Odyssey" makes clear also becomes a better one. Homer ends the years of strife by having Minerva "make a covenant of peace."

What's ahead for us as international educators and philanthropists in this new venture is also the realization of something invented long ago in this land and needed more than ever on a global basis. As another Odysseus (the poet Odysseus Elytis) put in his speech accepting the Nobel Prize for literature in 1979:

To hold the Sun in one's hands without being burned, to transmit it like a torch to those following, is a painful act but, I believe, a blessed one. We have need of it. One day the dogmas that hold men in chains will be dissolved before a consciousness so inundated with light that it will be one with the Sun, and it will arrive on those ideal shores of human dignity and liberty.