The Race to build Global Universities: Where is Africa in all of this?
There are few factors that are as critical in determining the level of development (or underdevelopment) of a nation as the quality (or lack thereof) of its education systems. This is especially true of the tertiary education system, which includes among others, the universities, polytechnics, teachers’ colleges, professional institutes etc. For the sake of brevity, I shall be concentrating on the universities because they are charged with producing a nation’s intellectual elite who man the commanding heights in government, business and society, and on whose shoulders a disproportionate share of the responsibility for national development fall on. Universities are also charged with producing the research that serves as the intellectual fuel of national development.
There is plenty afoot going on in the world’s universities that any nation’s leaders and engaged members of the public ought to be mindful of, given the critical importance of the university system’s twin missions. There is a growing trend in which potential university students are increasingly likely, to shop for a university education beyond their nation’s borders. This is largely driven by domestic supply’s inability to meet the burgeoning demand and by an increasing taste for a world class education. This is putting immense pressure on universities everywhere to upgrade their facilities, standards, courses etc. in a bid to attract this fleet footed army of student hopefuls, who bring with them hard currency and more importantly, often number among the best and brightest from their home countries and thus are a potential source of research talent that are fed into the pipeline of the host nation’s development engine. This race by universities to build global stars takes place along a number of dimensions and we shall explore them one by one.
The forces of globalization have worked to create a more open, increasingly borderless world. Higher education has not been spared the effects of this phenomenon, and as a result universities have become increasingly more global in outlook, both in terms of practices and the recruitment of students. The U.S, leads the way here and has done so for long time. Nations as diverse as China, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Germany and France among others, are caught up in a race to create U.S.-style research institutions designed to be competitive at the highest levels. The UK (Particularly Oxford and Cambridge) and Australia have for some time now given the US some measure of competition, but it remains the unquestioned leader for now. It perhaps behooves us to briefly look at the American University model that happens to be the object of such worldwide admiration.
The US began its ascendancy to the top of global university space shortly after World War 2. It overtook the previous leader Germany, for two reasons. The first was Germany, was obviously being distracted with the rebuild effort after the horrors of WW2. The second being that the US borrowed and perfected a university model originally pioneered by Germany in the 19th century, which placed heavy emphasis on research, thus bringing to the fore the graduate school experience, many say to the detriment of undergraduate teaching. Prior to this German innovation, universities all over the world, focused almost exclusively on undergraduate teaching. In the US today, there are still many tertiary institutions that focus exclusively on undergraduate teaching. Such institutions are geberally referred to as colleges, while the appellation, universities is reserved for those institutions that in addition to the undergraduate portion, offer graduate programs and professional programs like medical, law and business schools. Often the undergraduate portion of a university would be referred to as a college. For example, the undergraduate portion of Harvard University is referred to as Harvard College. The rebuild of Europe and the adoption of the research model in America, combined to make the US, the premier destination for the best and brightest, seeking the best education globally available.
It is tempting to ask where this so called best and brightest come from. According to Open Doors, an NGO that tracks these things, the percentage break down of country of origin of international students for 2022/23 are as follows:
China — 27% India — 25% South Korea — 4% Canada — 3% Brazil — 2% Nigeria — 2% Japan — 2% Taiwan — 2% South Korea — 2% Saudi Arabia — 2%
China and India alone account for 52% of all international students. The international student population in total numbers over 6.4 million people in 2021.
I should also point out that upgrading indigenous universities to world class standards is not the only modus operandi of countries looking to build global universities. Forming partnerships with, or local campuses of internationally recognized university brands is another method being actively pursued. Singapore is a good example of this. It has partnerships with Yale University, Chicago Graduate School of Business, Johns Hopkins University, Carnegie Mellon University, and INSEAD among others. It has also done quite well in building world class universities of its own given that its National University of Singapore (NUS) has attained global recognition. Saudi Arabia is another rather interesting example. In 2009, it launched the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). In a country that typically segregates male and female students from each other, KAUST is uncharacteristically co-educational. A necessary compromise, if it was going to be successful in attracting the top flight students, faculty and partners from around the world that it was hoping to attract. Its initial partners included the mechanical engineering department at the University of California–Berkeley; the Institute for Computational Earth Sciences and Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin; Stanford University’s computer science and applied mathematics departments; the biosciences and bioengineering departments at the University of Cambridge; and the departments of chemical engineering, materials science, and engineering at Imperial College, London.
The globalization of universities has led to or perhaps grow along side with and become intertwined in a parallel development that though mired in great controversy, shows no sign of going away. I am talking about the emergence of various rankings of universities at the national, continental and global levels. Rankings ostensibly fill a market need, the desire for a simple, reliable metric for gauging the quality of education attainable at a given university, but there is so much passioned debate about how reliable that metric is. Criticism runs the gamut of, that rankings have a heavy research bias and not enough emphasis on the quality of teaching, that there are important institutional quality factors that can’t be captured by numbers, that they often focus on reputation instead of actual accomplishments, that rankings focus excessively on “inputs” rather than “outputs” by giving colleges credit for admitting well qualified students rather than for how well they actually educated those students, that they encourage fraud, that the factors used in the rankings provide colleges with perverse incentives to focus on the factors that are measured rather than taking on the more elusive task of providing the best possible education for their students, that there is insufficient academic rigor underlying the rankings, and that it is just a meaningless exercise as an instrument of national policy.
The various rankings have tried to evolve in response to these criticisms and wholly new rankings have been created to cater to specific criticisms. However, ranking are increasingly used not just by potential students but also by policy makers and industry officials. Also, others have pointed out that rankings have the potential to radically democratize the entrenched academic pecking order and thus force the leading universities to continue to earn their places at the top of the academic food chain. What is clear and unquestioned about rankings is, love them or hate them, you can’t just ignore them.
Yet another important trend in the global university education space has been the emergence of education companies that provide university education services to market segments that are very different from the traditional clientele of traditional universities. Most traditional universities around the world are public universities. The most prestigious universities in the US, though private, are non-profit organizations. These education companies run universities that are clearly out to make a profit like a traditional business. They also tend to target working adults who want practical, part-time courses that will improve their standing in the job market as opposed to the traditional universities that target the national or global student elite. The education companies tend to aggressively leverage technology to provide flexible courses and to bring down costs of administration. The market for the services these education companies offer is very large (particularly in South America), running into at least several hundreds billions of dollars and as demand as demand for post-secondary education continues unabated in the developing world, the market for flexible, practical, career-oriented education will only get larger.
I have tried to give a picture of the evolving global university education landscape. In researching this piece, I couldn’t help but wonder what Africa’s place in all of this was. The main text I used for research barely mentioned Africa at all. It would seem that Africa, like in the case of global free trade, seems to be again on the periphery of the global free trade in minds. The continent’s university education system seems to be beset by more fundamental problems. It is to this I turn, in my next piece.
BEFORE YOU GO: Please share this with as many people as possible. Also check out my book, Why Africa is not rich like America and Europe.
Bibliography
1. Wildavsky, Ben. 2010 The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World New Jersey: Princeton University Press
