Educational Collaboration in the New Knowledge Economy
Address to the Asia-Pacific Association for International Education

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

Singapore, 9 March 2007

The advent of today’s knowledge economy comes at an unusual time in the history of geography and of books.  For the second time in a thousand years, scholars agree that the world is flat.  The discovery that so many jobs can be done in many places means that borders are dissolving and that there is unprecedented mobility of people and ideas.  And the book by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman proving that this is so, is number sixteen on Amazon.com’s list of most popular items in the world.  It is bested, however, by two versions of the new Harry Potter book, two diet books, one on dog training, and the autobiographies of Sidney Poitier and Barack Obama. 

Boundaries are also dissolving for higher education, but less rapidly.  And this is creating a tension in many countries between what is needed from education and what universities are actually producing.  This tension – and what can be done about it – is the subject of my address.

Those of us in the field of international education tend to forget that the internationalization of higher education is happening on a very small scale and that our experience with globalization is still in its early stages.  There are more than two hundred sovereign states today; in only twenty of them does the enrollment of international students in higher education exceed 1%.  Nearly 60% of all who study in countries outside their own do so in just five places: the US, UK, Germany, France, and Australia.  While the U.S. is the leading destination for international students, the roughly 600,000 currently enrolled on our campuses represent only a little more than three percent of total U.S. enrollments.  And they are not widely distributed; one-half attend just 150 of our 4,000 accredited colleges and universities.  Less than 1% of Americans in higher education are studying abroad and probably no more than 5% even have passports.

And according to the latest study by the UK’s Observatory on Borderless Education, most of the 10,000 colleges and universities registered in the UNESCO-IAU data base are not very borderless.  There are just eighty-two degree-granting campuses around the world that are branches of their home institutions.  Half are run by American institutions; three-quarters of these campuses have English-speaking parents.  A third are in just two countries: UAE and Qatar.  Only a handful of U.S. graduate programs offer their students the ability to earn dual degrees, and most of these are concentrated in Central America.

 Globalization is also proving difficult for faculty.  Once assigned to a department and with classes to teach, travel and study abroad is not encouraged and often not well-recognized or rewarded in tenure and other matters determining who advances in an academic career.  When students seek advice about where to study outside their own country, faculty may lack the regional knowledge to advise them and universities may not be able to afford full-time staff and departments responsible for advising students on where to go and for orienting international students they receive. Many faculty also find it hard to evaluate programs in other countries to the satisfaction of their deans and accrediting agencies.  At elite schools everywhere, moreover, faculty tend to believe (and tell their students) that most international study destinations beyond the US and the UK are not actually better for them academically than if the student had remained at home.  And when faculty do encourage their students to go abroad, they worry (as we do too) about the rate and likelihood of return.  While globalization is providing an increasing number of jobs to which a person can return in places like India, China, and Korea, this has not happened universally.

Another reason that international is not necessarily a part of what it means to be educated relates to a gap between what leading CEOs say and their HR departments do.  Most heads of multinational corporations these days extol the virtue of having a workforce whose minds are open to the world.  They say they seek internationally-educated staff and that intercultural skills are as essential to success as discipline-specific knowledge.  Yet study after study has shown that HR departments in making hiring decisions give almost no weight to study abroad and opt for top grades and disciplines that make it very difficult for students to have an international experience.

So what seems to be missing in our world is precisely what this session and conference are all about.  Collaboration and a paradigm shift.  The world has changed faster outside the walls of academe than within it; the global economy places a premium on international education that we ourselves have been slow to recognize.  For example, in studies by the American Council on Education of college and university mission statements, researchers continue to find that while the rhetoric is there, the course content and promotion of study abroad is not.  Now you may argue that superpowers have a special responsibility to internationalize education, but every culture recognizes the importance seeing the world beyond one’s borders to become educated.  In the ancient Middle East and the last time the world was considered flat, Augustine observed that “to become educated without traveling is like reading a book without turning a single page.”  In the Hadith, the Prophet urges his followers “to seek knowledge even unto China.”  And Confucius notes that “a journey of 10,000 li is better than reading 10,000 books.”  It is time we all made sure those steps happen.

As this new century began, there was considerable debate – in which this region
figured prominently – over what it would be called.  The rise of China caused some to say it would be the Chinese Century; then along came India’s IT revolution.  So some argued it would be the Asian Century.  This led in my own country to a resurgence of the debate about whether or not America was in decline and whether it would shape the 21st century as much as it did the 20th.  The debate over America Redux, coupled to our recovery from 9/11, led some to argue that a broad Pax Americana lay ahead.

My own view is that we are at the beginning of an era that belongs to no one. 

 Many countries in Asia are rapidly becoming regional hubs for education. Organizations like APAIE and the Asia Fellowship Program are providing the vehicles through which genuinely transforming changes in scholarship and student and faculty exchange can happen.  As the 1990s generation of bilateral exchange programs and agreements formed between Asia-Pacific institutions and their counterparts in the United States – and which proved so one-sided – come to an end and their progenitors retire, collaborative efforts initiated by institutions in the region will be increasingly welcome.  
      
As the president of Johns Hopkins University wrote in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, “Universities must prospect for the best brains, skills, and talent. In recent years, it has increasingly become evident that they will have to go far beyond their traditional borders to find those resources.” As Americans and Europeans search for new destinations, and talent pools, the world will become even flatter. For us especially, the Pacific Ocean ought to be what opens the door and invites us into this region rather than an obstacle that keeps us at home. In the process, I hope this means that “international” will become a part of the way all of us define what it means to be educated. For with more human beings attending higher educational institutions than probably attended them in the past 2000 years combined, I think the best thing we could all work toward is making sure, in fact, that this becomes the International Education Century.