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The Great Brain RaceBen Wildavsky

WASHINGTON, DC For decades, research universities in the United States have beenuniversally acknowledged as the worlds leaders in science and engineering, unsurpassed sinceWorld War II in the sheer volume and excellence of the scholarship and innovation that theygenerate. But there are growing signs that the rest of the world is gaining ground fast

building new universities, improving existing ones, competing hard for the best students, andrecruiting US-trained PhDs to return home to work in university and industry labs. Is theinternational scholarly pecking order about to be overturned?

There is no question that the academic enterprise has become increasingly global, particularlyin the sciences. Nearly three million students now study outside their home countries a 57%increase in the last decade. Foreign students now dominate many US doctoral programs,accounting for 64% of PhDs in computer science, for example. Tsinghua and Pekinguniversities together recently surpassed Berkeley as the top sources of students who go on toearn American PhDs.

Faculty are on the move, too. Half of the worlds top physicists no longer work in their nativecountries. And major institutions such as New York University and the University ofNottingham are creating branch campuses in the Middle East and Asia. There are now 162

satellite campuses worldwide, an increase of 43% in just the past three years.

At the same time, growing numbers of traditional source countries for students, from SouthKorea to Saudi Arabia, are trying to improve both the quantity and quality of their owndegrees, engaging in a fierce and expensive race to recruit students and create world-class research universities of their own.

All this competition has led to considerable hand-wringing in the West. During a 2008campaign stop, for instance, then-candidate Barack Obama spoke in alarmed tones about thethreat that such academic competition poses to US competitiveness. If we want to keep onbuilding the cars of the future here in America, he declared, we cant afford to see thenumber of PhDs in engineering climbing in China, South Korea, and Japan even as its droppedhere in America.

Nor are such concerns limited to the US. In some countries, worries about educationalcompetition and brain drains have led to outright academic protectionism. India and China arenotorious for the legal and bureaucratic obstacles they place in front of Western universitiesthat want to set up satellite campuses catering to local students.

And sometimes students who want to leave face barriers. Several years ago, the president ofone of the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology effectively banned undergraduates fromaccepting academic or business internships overseas.

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There are other impediments to global mobility, too, not always explicitly protectionist, but allhaving the effect of limiting access to universities around the world. In the years following theterrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, for example, legitimate security concerns led toenormous student-visa delays and bureaucratic hassles for foreigners aspiring to study in theUS. Student numbers have since rebounded, despite intermittent problems, but there remainsevere limits on work and residency visas, which should serve as an enticement for the bestand brightest to study in the US.

Perhaps some of the anxiety over the new global academic enterprise is understandable,particularly in a period of massive economic uncertainty. But educational protectionism is asbig a mistake as trade protectionism. The globalization of higher education should beembraced, not feared including in the US. There is every reason to believe that theworldwide competition for human talent, the race to produce innovative research, the push toextend university campuses to multiple countries, and the rush to train talented graduateswho can strengthen increasingly knowledge-based economies will be good for the US as well.

Above all, this is because the expansion of knowledge is not a zero-sum game. More PhDproduction and burgeoning research in China, for instance, doesnt take away from Americasstore of learning; on the contrary, it enhances what we know and can accomplish. Becauseknowledge is a public good, intellectual gains by one country often benefit others. Chineseresearch may well provide the building blocks for innovation by US entrepreneurs or those

from other countries.

Indeed, the economic benefits of a global academic culture are significant. Just as free tradeprovides the lowest-cost goods and services, benefiting both consumers and the most efficientproducers, global academic competition is making free movement of people and ideas, on thebasis of merit, more and more the norm, with enormously positive consequences forindividuals, universities, and countries. Today's swirling patterns of mobility and knowledgetransmission constitute a new kind of free trade: free trade in minds.

The US should respond to the globalization of higher education not with angst but with a senseof possibility. Neither a gradual erosion in the US market share of students, nor theemergence of ambitious new competitors in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East means thatAmerican universities are on an inevitable path to decline.

By resisting protectionist barriers at home and abroad, by continuing to recruit and welcomethe worlds best students, by sending more students overseas, by fostering cross-nationalresearch collaboration, and by strengthening its own research universities, the US can sustainits well-established academic excellence while continuing to expand the sum total of globalknowledge and prosperity.

Ben Wildavsky is a senior fellow in research and policy at the Kauffman Foundationand author ofThe Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping theWorld.