International Investment in Human Capital: Overseas Education for Development

Overseas education for development is a notion that is based on a shared belief among the older, industrialized, high-income countries and the new nations emerging out of the former colonies that the old had much to teach and the new much to learn. For their part, the developing countries accepted the principle that their economic, political, and social advancement would be possible only by learning how successful nations did it. Since the new nations often placed economic objectives above other values, they looked abroad, particularly for training in practical skills mat would increase domestic output and efficiency.

The conference that yielded the papers for this volume was prompted both by the sense that the realities of overseas education, some of which have changed gradually and quietly in recent years, have not been widely appreciated by those in policy-making positions, and also by the realization that, in the 1990s and into me twenty-first century, conditions are likely to change even more.