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>> Maggie: Welcome. So my name's Maggie Johnston. I work in Education and University Relations
here at Google. So welcome to another installment of "Author's at Google" and today we have
Ben Wildavsky, who is a senior fellow in research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation, and
a guest scholar at the Brookings Institute. He is also a former, ah, what is it, educational
editor for US News and World Report, and a higher education reporter for the San Francisco
Chronicle. So he's here today to tell us about his new book, which is "The Great Brain Race".
The only tactical thing I wanted to mention is that when we get to the Q&A part of the
session, there is a microphone over there, and we want to try to make sure that everything
is recorded, because we will be putting this up on YouTube. So Ben, welcome.
>> Ben: Well, Thank you very much Maggie for that kind introduction. I am really delighted
to be here. My brother Adam, who is here, is a Googler in the New York Office, and so
I have been there a few times. Never been to the Googleplex. It's already looks like
a wonderful place. And you know Google is one of the worlds' talent magnets, so that
is something that I will be talking about today. So I hope that this will have a particular
salience to all of you. When I was told, asking around, in terms of what would really be effective
for a Google audience, obviously a sophisticated bunch, highly educated with a lot of skills,
and I was told that the crucial thing was to start with pictures of cute animals. These
are some monkeys that I came across when I was in South East India, a couple of years
ago. This is the edge of the National forest and this is a place called, it's outside of
Chennai, which used to be called Madras. And this is taken from the balcony of a guest
house where I stayed. You can see these monkeys are very adorable, but it turns out that they
have a dark side. I found out the day after I arrived, that if you leave your room, and
you leave any of your windows open, or the door open, they will come in and they'll trash
the place. So I guess that tells you that things are not always what they seem. And
the same is true of this place, it's completely gorgeous, not only are there monkeys, there
are deer running around, there are these magnificent banyan trees everywhere. And it looks like
a gorgeous, but it's sort of a sleepy out of the way place. But it turns out that this
is the campus of an elite engineering school; The Indian Institute of Technology in Madras.
It's one of a chain of IIT's around the country. They are often called the MIT of India. It's
incredibly hard to get into. Only 2 or 3% of applicants make it in on this intense national
exam. And not only is this out of the way place home to this elite campus, it's also
very much connected to the new global network of knowledge and talent mobility that I'll
be talking about a little bit more. My first day as I usually do, when I visit a campus,
I went to see the President, known as the Director, a guy named M.S. Ananth right here,
and he's just come back from Davos in Switzerland. A big International gathering of the world's
elite every year, and he'd just taken part in a higher education working group, that's
headed up by Rick Levin who is the president of Yale University.
So this out of the way place is very much connected to the global education market place
that I'm going to talk about that is now developing. And as I was working on this, oh I should
also mention walking around the campus of this IIT, I went to the recruiting office
or careers office where there was signup sheets for interviews as you see in American campuses.
And Google was there with a signup sheet, McKenzie was there with a signup sheet and
I walked down the same corridor and I saw a big poster advertising graduate scholarships
at a place called KAUST and this is the King of Jewel University of Science and Technology;
it's a brand new university that's been created just last year in Saudi Arabia. They're trying
to recruit the best in the world so of course they're going everywhere including of course
to this corner of India. And as I was working on the book, I came across
lots of scenes like this that were to me, to my westernized somewhat unexpected juxtapositions
that I would not have thought of, and in fact the whole book was really not what I expected
to write. I went into this with an idea for a book that would sort of be a Cooks tour
of the worlds' great universities with maybe a chapter about some of the best, most interesting
places out there. So the IIT's were a stop on this tour. But I discovered after working
on this for a couple of months that I felt I was missing the real story. A much more
interesting story, which was really a shaking up and is a shaking up of the old order of
Universities. A real change in who are the places that are at the top and who are going
to be the places that are at the top in the future. Now, I'm gonna talk about what I think
global higher education is, why I think it's important, why some people are worried about
this whole phenomena of globalization and why I think they shouldn't be worried, because
in my view what I call free trade in minds, is really an opportunity for the world and
not a threat. I'm going to talk about three main trends.
One is huge academic mobility around the world of students in particular and also of faculty
increasingly, it's at a level we've never seen before. Now the 2nd is a real quest everywhere
from South Korea to Saudi Arabia to China, to try to create very competitive Universities
that are world class; they can compete with the best in the world.
And the 3rd is near and dear to my heart, since as Maggie mentioned in introducing me,
I am the former editor of the US News and World Report College and graduate school guides
rankings. Rankings have now become a global phenomena. So I'm going to start by telling
you a little of what's happening in the world of mobility.
The first thing to know is the numbers are huge. There are now 3 million globally mobile
students, students studying outside their home countries. That's a 57% increase in just
the last decade. And I should mention, these are not study abroad kids, these are not the
semester and summer program. That stat is only for students who are going overseas for
a year or more. Many of them are degree seeking students. There is a very big; these students
are very eagerly recruited by Universities. Really for several reasons. At the elite level
the best graduate students, the best post docs, form the backbone of the research enterprise
at the big research universities. So everyone wants the best. At the mass level students
of course a source of human capital, a lot of countries want to have great students coming
there. They also want the revenue because in many cases foreign students pay full freight,
just as out of state students, for example, in California the UC system, pay a lot more
than in-state students. And the recruiting has gotten so intense that people have resorted
to some unconventional methods. New Zealand, like Australia, is trying very hard to go
after the Asian student market, so their higher ed promotion agency came out with a viral
video a few years ago. I thought the video may not be appropriate
for this forum, but I have a still from that video. And you'll see that it shows a young
couple sort of smooching in the corner of the hot tub, and the camera pulls back and
you see this very stern disapproving parents over in the other corner. And then you see
the caption says "Get further away from your parents". And this was a huge success, I think
they had it out there for a month or two, and then they discreetly took it off. You
can still find it if you Google hard enough. And what's remarkable is how successful this
seems to have been, because if you look at the 10 year trend in student recruiting, New
Zealand is actually number two, second only to, ah, I actually can't read from here, I
think it's South Korea at the top. So I guess this shows you that marketing can really work.
So mobility of students is one big phenomena. We know that academics are of course very
mobile. Half of the worlds top physicists no long work in their home countries. We also
see a lot of mobility of research, which you can define in various ways. Just in terms
of cross boarder collaborations in scientific publishing, there has been a doubling of those
collaborations since 1990, more than a doubling. You also have interesting new models developing.
Yale University, for example has a collaboration with some Chinese universities where each
really takes advantage of their comparative advantage, as economists would say.
Yale provides some high level tenured professors, scientists, who go over to work in China with
Chinese Universities where there are very high quality and very cheap lab space. There
are very highly trained techs, again very inexpensive. China, the Chinese universities
benefit from this great expertise that comes to them. And the US gets the ability to do
experiments on a scale, and research on a scale, that they can't do as easily or as
cheaply as back home. So it's really win-win. And I think that dynamic may change as the
skill set in China gets larger. But for the time being it's really working very well.
The other mobility example, there is a disproportionate of the best scientists have worked outside
their home countries during their careers. Now that is not necessarily causal, it may
just be some kind of correlation, but I think it's striking that the global experience is
so closely associated with really excellent research.
So a third kind of mobility is mobility of campuses themselves. And by that I'm talking
about the phenomena of branch campuses or satellite campuses. This is when western universities
typically spread out and create outposts in the Middle East very often, also in Asia where
there is a huge demand for western degrees. There are now 162 of these satellite campuses
around the world and again that's a figure that's increasing very quickly. It's gone
up by 43% in just the past 3 or 4 years. There's just huge demand for western style universities.
And one place I visited is in Doha, in Qatar, and it's called Education City. This is a
compound on the edge of the city, funded very, with a lot of money from the Qatari government.
And places like Georgetown School of Foreign Service has set up a campus there: Northwestern's
Journalism School, the Medill school is there; Cornell's Medical school, The Weill School
of medicine is there. And you'll see this is Texas A&M's campus. The buildings are incredibly
lavish, marble all over the place and again you see these interesting juxtapositions,
this massive tall door, probably twice the height, or one and a half times the height
of the room that we're in. And it opens up and you see three young women in black Abaya's
from head to toe coming out, and they're not veiled but you know they have the traditional
garment, and they walk out, but then if you look down the street you can't see them in
the slide, but there's these big banners that say Welcome to Aggieland, and that's of course
the kind of thing you see on the home campus in Texas in College Station. And they're really
trying to bring a piece of Texas to the Middle East. So you walk into these buildings and
you'll see the men's prayer rooms, the women's prayer room, but then you'll also see all
kinds of Texas paraphernalia, you'll see the fast food courts, and it's really a meeting
of cultures.
Interestingly to me there's also an effort I think, really very much encouraged by the
host country here to bring in some liberalization and some of the values we associate, I mean
classical liberalization we associate with western universities including debate. So
there's a debate series that's sort of in the tradition of the Oxford style of debates
and there are posters all over these campus's saying "The next debate the resolution was
resolved. This house believes that Gulf Arabs value profit over people". And you know that's
the kind of thing I wasn't expecting when I went over there. And I think that tells
you that there really is an effort to push the envelope a bit. I talked to a guy at the
Medill school of Journalism and he was going around to the local newspapers and talking
with them and saying "You know what? You don't have to put a picture of the Emir on the front
page every day,” which was something new for them. So there is really an effort to
spread the influence of Western universities as I said, with encouragement from the host
countries.
Now I've talked about all these kinds of mobility and I think they’re fascinating but they
have created a certain amount of anxiety. And I'll just give you one or two examples.
One of the things that you hear a lot about, and I just talked to some Indonesian scholars
a couple of weeks ago and it's something they raised; is the question of "brain drain."
It’s something that has been worrying the developing world for some decades. Many of
these countries don't have great education opportunities themselves. A lot of their best
people go overseas to universities in the west, often in the States. You know we've
been a huge magnet for foreign students since World War Two. And the fear is that they'll
go away, they won't come back, and people will lose their talent. And sometimes people
take measures to try to prevent this which I think are very ill advised. Just a couple
of years ago, the president of another one of these IIT's in India, in Bombay, north
of what is now Mumbai, he basically said, all the students who were very sort after
for foreign internships in industry and academia, he said you can't go overseas any more. I
don't want to lose the talent. You have to stay home. Obviously this was very unpopular.
And conversely on the receiving end, mobility is sometimes viewed with suspicion or concern
because people are worried about their own students being crowded out by foreign students.
In Malaysia for example, you know, they've put a quota of 5% on foreign students coming
into their public universities. Even here in the States we don't tend to be so restrictionist
in explicit ways, but once in a while you'll hear of a quota like that. The University
of Tennessee as recently of 10 years ago had a quota of 20% on foreign students in their
graduate department. Whereas nationally in fields like Engineering, or Computer Sciences,
you all know, you hear of any place else you hear of, 60-65% of PhD’s in those fields
are foreign born. So people are worried about this, they take various measures to try to
stop it or to slow it down. My view is that we really should not worry about this kind
of mobility, we should embrace it. It's really good for us. The key inside here, I think,
is that we're in a dynamic world in higher education. It's not a static world any more.
And the old patterns of mobility are changing. So, yeah, brain drain, I wouldn't say it's
a non-issue, it's a problem for many countries but we're starting to see new patterns as
the world is changing. I'll just mention that in China for example, traditionally a big
sending country and India, also a big sending country; you're now seeing what sometimes
will be called "brain circulation." And so the idea is that somebody might follow
the traditional pattern to go to the west for a degree, but they might then go to another
country for a 2nd degree and then as their economies are taking off, they are much more
likely than before to come back home and they might work for a multi-national, but they're
able to do things that they did not always do. And [coughs] Excuse me. China there's
also, you know, recruiting patterns are changing regionally. China now takes in more foreign
students, mostly from Asia, than it sends overseas. Which is contrary to the image that
we have of China. People call this, as I said, brain circulation.
I've heard the term "brain trade." Just to show how it's different from the migration
of the past, and one wonderful example is a guy named, at the faculty level, a guy named
Choon Fong Shih who is ethnically Chinese, born in Singapore, goes to Canada for a Masters,
goes to Harvard for a PHD, becomes a very well regarded material scientist, I believe
that's his field. He goes to Brown University, becomes a tenured professor, very successful.
So far that's the traditional trajectory, you know, brain drain for Singapore, a gain
for the US you might say. But in the new world, he get's recruited back to Singapore to the
National University of Singapore which is trying very hard to upgrade itself. So he
becomes the head of an institute there, and then he gets promoted; he becomes president
of National University of Singapore. So that's already a reversal of the traditional pattern.
But then the new twist is, I've talked about KAUST; the new Saudi university, he gets recruited
by KAUST when they started up last year, to become the first president of KAUST. So, he's
sort of, I wouldn't say he's typical, but he's emblematic of the kind of possibilities
that we're seeing in this dynamic world of talent mobility.
Now, you might say, well OK, all this talent mobility is something that can be achieved
by individual decisions. You know, students, are able to, you know, if they have a desire
for these kinds of degrees and there are host universities that want them, they can make
these decisions individually, and the same for the faculty who are starting to move around
more. But as globalization is upon us, you know, it's a lot harder for universities as
institutions to change. You know, universities are sort of notoriously change resistant.
But in fact what's really remarkable is that universities are beginning to change in really
big ways. I think that is because they're really anxious to keep up with this very competitive
globalized world. And this is seen in the second big trend that
I've mentioned which is this real effort to create world class universities all over the
place. I think the central reason people are doing this, is they really see, very correctly
in my view, that creating great universities is just key to innovation and it's key to
economic growth and one of my favorite quotes on this, is from two economists Claudia Goldin
and Lawrence Katz in a book that came out a couple of years ago, "The Race between Education
and Technology", and they say as you can see "Human capital, embodied in one's people,
is the most fundamental part of the wealth of nations." And I think this is now broadly
accepted. Everybody wants to create, it's become a cliché but sometimes clichés are
true; they want to create knowledge economies. They want to improve education and have the
kind of societies that are gonna prosper economically because of the human capital that they have.
And you know they understand that their competition is just like other areas in business. The
competition is not just local, it’s not regional it's not national, it's global and
they want to compete with the best. So, how are they doing this?
Well, really in three ways.
They are spending a lot of money. They want to be competitive, and money is the weapon
that you have. So in China, billions are being spent, not only on upgrading the capacity
of the universities, the number of students in China, the number of students enrolled
has quintupled in the past decade or so. So huge changes in capacity, but also trying
to focus on quality with a much narrower set of universities that they would really like
part of the scientific elite worldwide. At the same time, in Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah
started KAUST with a 10 billion dollar endowment, which meant that it instantly had the 6th
largest university endowment in the world. So spending is very important.
The other thing that I have already alluded to is recruiting. One of the ways that you
do this is that you try to get the best talent in terms of facility talent to your campuses.
Again, China has done this in a very big way. Because they have more money from the government,
because the economy is now taking off, they're trying to get western professors, often Chinese
born professors who have gone to the west, they are trying to bring them back, and they
can offer them very attractive packages. They call them "sea turtles." Which, I'm not a
Chinese speaker unfortunately, but apparently in Chinese sea turtle is a homonym for the
word for returnee. So they are really going after the sea turtles in a big way. And the
same is true for places like South Korea, who has government funding to try to get western
professors. So does the National University of Singapore. So that's the second thing.
And the third thing they're doing is really trying to forge partnerships with western
universities. Singapore is probably the best example of this, as I mentioned they want
to become a global hub. They are trying to jump start, what they already have, and how
do you jump start it? You try to bring in other people who already are the best. So
MIT now has a presence at the National University of Singapore. So does the University Of Chicago
Business School. You know business of course, along with the so called stem subjects, science
and engineering and technology, business is very, very popular in foreign countries that
want to benefit from western expertise. So Singapore brings in lots of other places as
part of this new ethos of competition.
Now again, I think that these are fascinating and important developments. But they're causing
a lot of worries, a lot of anxieties. I think that in the west in general, and in the United
States in particular, the central fear is this; we are going to lose our edge. Right
now we are number one, and we may not be number one any longer. I think that when it comes
to Chinese universities, Asian universities in particular, there is a sense that we are
educationally threatened, that we are economically threatened. These places are producing enormous
numbers of science and engineering PhD's. You know, an example of this kind of anxiety
came during the last presidential campaign, when President Obama at one of his campaign
speeches basically said "how are we going to stay competitive when the number of PhD's
in these subjects is soaring in places like South Korea and Japan and China, and it's
stagnating or getting less here?" The basic view here is that, if others are getting ahead,
then we must be falling behind. Once again I think that it's perhaps understandable if
there is some worry about what is happening elsewhere, but I really think that it's misguided
and that we should embrace these changes. We shouldn't be afraid of them. Now it's absolutely
true that western universities are getting a run for their money. I mean we're in a much
more competitive environment than we have been before. I think that we should be energized
by this. We shouldn't be worried about it, and the fundamental reasons, really one of
the take home points, you know, I can't resist showing this again, the new book, "The Great
Brain Race." One of the take home points is that increasing knowledge is not a zero sum
game. There is not a finite amount of knowledge in the world that we all have to scramble
to fight over to get our piece of. If there is more smart people in China, more people
with PhD's, with more education, that's good for us. It's not bad for us. You know, economists
will talk about knowledge as a public good. It's something that can't be contained within
national borders. So a lot of people, I'm going to use the economist Tyler Cowen, there's
many others who have made this point, if there is a discovery which is made in South Korea
or Saudi Arabia or wherever. In the United States we are particularly recognized for
our ability to innovate for example. So it's entirely possible that there is new knowledge
created someplace else, but then we'll come in, and we'll do something fascinating with
it and important, and we might create the next Google. So again, I think if you take
a more expansive view of what is going on, you can see the opportunities which are out
there. Now I've talked about the ways in which a
very highly competitive global market place has developed. And in my view, global education
markets, just like markets in finance or in other areas, markets need information in order
to function effectively. It may be inevitable that all this global competition, mobility
of students, competition to create world class universities, has given rise to global college
rankings. They have really proliferated in the last couple of decades, not just at the
national level, but globally as well. I'll just give you a very quick view of what I
think has happened with rankings. The first one which I have been able to find, which
for a Bay Area audience, I hope will be particularly interesting, came in 1895 at the University
of California, at Berkeley. Then, practically a brand new university. This is a chart you
can see, it's a little hard to read. This is one of the first rankings I have been able
to find, and it's also very cutting edge because it's a value added ranking, which is now a
very big issue today. You'll see there is a picture of these young men, it's all men
doing calisthenics outside somewhere on the CAL campus, and there is a chart trying to
show the measurements of these guys; their neck measurements, their chest measurements,
their thigh measurements. And they compare them to a sample of these blue bloods on the
East Coast, at all these old established colleges, Cornell and Amherst. They have a pretty impressive
sample, its 30,000 guys on the East Coast, and as you see at the beginning of this, the
East Coast blue-bloods probably did a lot of working out at their prep schools, who
knows, they are way ahead of the California guys. But after two years of these calisthenics
the California guys surge ahead.
So value has been added. And that's really a wonderful example of how these kinds of
comparisons, albeit not in the academic realm, they've been around a long time. Now for the
next 100 years or so, there were a variety of different rankings, which I have a whole
chapter in the book which gives chapter and verse as it were, but they really did not
take off until 1983. Which is when my alma mater, my journalistic alma mater, US News
started these college rankings. Initially just really a beauty contest, a poll of college
presidents, a fairly conventional journalistic exercise to try to figure out who you think
is the best. And it quickly became very popular. The presidents came in, they were mad, they
protested, they said 'you have to stop, you're outside of the guild, how dare you presume
to come in and judge us?' And US News basically said well OK, we'll try to make it more sophisticated,
so they added a lot of measures, graduation rates, research spending, qualifications for
entering students, etc, etc. Ah, the rankings continued to be hugely popular,
hugely controversial as you know. What many people don't know is how quickly the rankings
spread to more than 40 countries now. Individual rankings by country, not only in
places you might expect, like Italy or like Canada but also in places like Peru or Kazakhstan,
which now have their own national level rankings. Cause there's huge interest in figuring out
how universities compare with one another. And then the big breakthrough came 7 years
ago when a Chinese university, Shanghai Jiao Tong University created its own global college
rankings, looking at universities around the world. This was very much part of China's
effort to upgrade its own universities and I think the basic feeling was well if you
wanted to figure out your goals, you have to have some kind of a benchmark, to figure
out where you are, where your competition is and where you want to go. So they created
rankings that are very scientifically oriented, engineering oriented, very connected. Very
much based on publication citation index's, things like that. The following year the British
publication called Times Higher Education; they used to have the word supplement on the
end, they created rankings as well. Quite different. Much more survey based, both of
academics and employers. They were initially more geared to consumers, but in fact both
rankings became very influential. Not only to individuals who might want to figure out
where to study, but also with universities and with policy makers, trying to figure out
what are the most effective institutions. And for the time being, if you look at, excuse
me, the top institutions, you could all, you know, coz I'm on Google, you can all look
for your Alma Mater's on these lists. These lists are actually pretty similar. This is
the most recent set of rankings. You'll note of course that the British rankings have a
few more British universities in the list. But, the top ones are pretty similar and they
may stay similar for some time to come, but I think that what is going to happen, because
of some of the ferment that I've talked about, is that if you go into the top 50, the top
100 we're going to see more and more new entrances, and more and more shaking up of the way things
have been. Now as in every other area that I've touched
on, there's a lot of worry about the rankings, there's a lot of concerns and a lot of criticisms.
And, you know, basically I'll give you an example, I went to a conference in Shanghai,
of university officials from all over the world and a French philosopher named Monique
Canto-Sperber who is the president of the Ecole Normale Superieure, which is one of
the elite grandes ecole in France, she came over to Shanghai to give a long impassioned
speech about how terrible the Shanghai rankings are and they used the wrong inputs and they
used the wrong measures and they don't do justice to wonderful places like hers. And
it was exactly like the discussions I used to have at US News when college presidents
would come in and blast us for all the dumb, terrible things we did with the US News Rankings.
And in this case it was great, I was on the side lines, it wasn't my fight, you know but
I got to see how the same dynamic was going on. You know, basically the criticism is that
the rankings focus on the wrong things, they create perverse incentives, critics will say.
The Shanghai rankings have a measure of how many Nobel winners you have on your faculty.
And you know, one question is, well Ok, they grabbed their Nobel 30 years ago, what does
that have to do with their current research, do they actually teach students? There are
lots of reasons why that might not be the ideal metric, um, and basically you know,
the criticism is that these rankings just don't tell you just how effective universities
really are.
Particularly when it comes to teaching and learning, as opposed to research and things
that are perhaps more easier to quantify. So in fact places like France, they really
hate the rankings, they've, people are coming up with their own. So another one of the French
elite universities and engineering schools called Paris M.Tech in Paris, they came up
with a global ranking but they created it themselves, but you ended up seeing this headline
in one of the web based Higher Education publications... It's one of my favorite headlines. And you'll
see it says "French do well in French world rankings". So this is what happens when people
start trying to police themselves you might say. So once again, you know, I think that
despite these anxieties and despite these criticisms I think rankings are ultimately
useful. And it's absolutely true that they have lots
of flaws. I'm well aware of the flaws in the US News rankings, the global rankings. They
each have their own flaws, but I think already, even in their flawed state they can be useful
to students, they can be useful to universities, they can be useful to policy makers. Trying
to get a rough sense on how different institutions are doing on certain measures and that's particularly
true as long as they are transparent, you know, you can figure out. Shanghai ranking
are particularly good at this, you can go to their website, you can look at everything,
and you can you know re-do it yourself if you think that there is a better way of looking
at all these factors. And I think you know, we have to understand
practically speaking these rankings are here to stay, you know. We're in an age of accountability.
Everybody wants to figure out how they're doing, how everyone else is doing, how they
can get ahead and you need some way of measuring that. So I think the real challenge will be
how to make the rankings better. Who knows, maybe there'll be a Google university rankings.
That would be a great project for a smart bunch of people like you. I think you know
what's encouraging is that there already are some efforts underway to improve existing
rankings and to create some new ones. I mentioned Times Higher Education. Well last fall, I
was gonna say they fired their data firm. But I got a stern email yesterday from a guy
at the data firm saying, we were not fired, the contract was not renewed. So I'll say
it for the record. In fact this other company QS has always been a full partner in the rankings
and they are continuing with their own rankings, whilst Times Higher brought in Thomson Reuters,
you know, obviously a very reputable place, to revamp their rankings completely. To do
it in a very transparent way, they're going around speaking about it, they're writing
about it. They have not yet revealed their exact new methodology, but I think it's very
encouraging, because it means they've listened to the criticism and they're trying to make
things better. The other thing that's happening is that places
are trying new kinds of rankings, not just the French version, but the OECD, the group
of industrialized nations based in Paris, the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development, they're developing something called AHELO. Yet another acronym but it has
to do with Higher Education and learning outcomes. And they're trying to measure, really, they
don't like to call a ranking, fair enough, but it's an assessment of what’s happening
on campus in terms of student learning. So they’re trying to see how much their students
know coming in, how good is their writing, how good are their analytic abilities. And
then what they hope to do is create a value added measure, this is down the road, but
they want to say Ok how are they coming in? How are they when they leave? How much have
they improved? And they're trying to come up cross national comparisons that will really
be valid. It's a difficult thing to do but I think it’s a really great effort and I
think that ultimately you could get better measures of learning, and somehow combine
them with better measures of research productivity, perhaps not only in science, but in other
fields as well. Then you'd be creating something very useful and I think we're going down that
road. So I've talked about mobility, I've talked
about world class universities and I've talked about rankings. And before I finish, I just
want to reiterate that despite these anxieties you sometimes hear about each of these phenomena
I think it's absolutely crucial that we reject academic protectionism, which is a term that
I use in the book, in all its forms. You know, as I said before, knowledge is not a finite
resource, it's not something we have to scramble over, it's something that can grow, it's something
that can benefit everybody, and I think it's just a great opportunity for us, everything
that's happening. The final thing I want to say, is when we
look at the future of higher education, is that we tend to see it in this country through
a paradigm of us vs. them. How are we doing? How is the rest of the world doing? And are
we keeping up? Are they going to outpace us? What’s going to happen in the great brain
race that I used for my title? And I think that already that this bottle is getting out
of date. I've talked about the research collaborations that are growing enormously. I've talked about
the partnerships that are being created in places like S.Po in Paris, an elite political
science school, has a partnership with the London School of Economics and with Columbia
University. You know, one could imagine in the future whole new ways of organizing universities.
You might see mergers; you might see multinational universities. Already John Sexton who is the
president of New York University. He has a vision for what he calls a global network
university. They're already creating a campus that's opening up in a couple of months in
Abu Dhabi. That's going to be an elite campus of undergraduates from all around the world.
His idea is that you might start in Abu Dhabi and finish in Washington Square, their New
York City campus. But they’re hoping to go to Shanghai as well. And if that happens,
you might start in Shanghai and finish in Abu Dhabi. So the notion of this single center
may no longer hold true. And you know, we really don't know what's going to happen in
the future. I mean you could go back to the 19th Century when German universities, you
know that's where the research university was created, ah, Americans went there, that
was state of the art, and they came back, they took this idea with them, they created
places like Johns Hopkins university, the University of Chicago, based on the German
model of putting research and teaching under one roof. We took this idea, we ran with it.
We became the best in the world. By far, since World War II, we are the magnet, right? So
now German universities have really fallen on hard times. They've had, for decades, a
kind of egalitarian funding model where everyone became kind of equal in their mediocrity,
and they just don't have great universities with a few, you know exceptions of some research
institutes. So now, you know 150 years later, Germany is now looking to us to figure out
how to become excellent. So things can change. I think we have to approach the future with
some humility. But I think that what ever happens, you know, I'm really convinced that
the key to innovation and the key to economic growth is going to continue to lie in the
freest possible movement of people and idea's; and that's true both in university campuses
and beyond. I think it's a very exciting time and I'm really curious to see what happens
next. Thank you very much.
[Applause from Audience]
I'd love to hear your questions.
[silence]
>>Person in audience: Ah Hi, I went to school in India, and one of the challenges that India
has is that the system sort of expects the government to do all its work for them. And
what it means is that the private sector has hardly invested any money in creating world
class institutions, and what very little there is,
>>Ben: I'm sorry; could you speak a little bit louder?
>>Person from audience: Sure. What very little there is, is basically a for-profit organization.
So what you have is all these politicians who are creating the schools and educating
for the money. And it's such a big problem that the Supreme Court has intervened time
and time again. To sort of cap the fees and ensure that the education is more egalitarian.
So my question is, how has the private sector in most other third world countries, so to
speak, contributed to education in general, or is it mostly the expectation that the government
does all the job for them?
>>Ben: Well that's a great question; I'm not just saying that. It really is and in fact
I have a chapter on the role of for-profits in globalization which I didn’t get into
in this smorgasbord overview presentation. But the private sector, the for profit sector,
is been very important, and I think that will continue to be the case. I mean there are
companies that we know in the United States, like the Apollo Group which is the parent
company of the University of Phoenix, Kaplan, which we think of for its tutoring programs,
um, a number of others that are really going global in a very big way. I mean Kaplan now,
the company is much more focused on, I think the percentage of their time and energy is
spent on higher education is now much greater than what they are doing in K12, and that’s
their going global too. So what you'll find in places like Latin America, in Asia, India
is somewhat of a special case as you know, because of the regulatory regime and the barriers
to going into India; but they're trying to fill, well it's really an unmet need in many
countries and it's often students or people who want to become students who are left out
of traditional systems, usually state run systems. And you sort of have the paradox
in some places where there will be an elite public university which is free, which sounds
very egalitarian. But it turns out that to get into this university you have to go to
expensive secondary schools that mostly affluent people are able to afford. So it's kind of
a phony egalitarianism, and what happens is there are lots of people middle class, working
class people who want to get ahead, they want to get degrees in often very practical subjects,
you know accounting, nursing, tourism, and so the for-profit sector is trying to provide
that. They're coming in, they're buying up existing, they're not really setting up the
McKaplan, or the McLaureate but they're trying to buy up existing institutions with local
brands but to try to take advantage of using up their expertise to create to go to skill,
and to create back office synergies and so forth. So, to sort of summarize, I think there's
a lot going on, I think this is going to grow very very quickly. It's already grown a lot.
Countries like India, it's tough. There's a lot of suspicion, there's a lot of worry
about quality, which is understandable, it’s the same in this country, you know people
are suspicious of the Phoenix’s and so forth, but I think look that’s never going to be
the whole package. That’s going to be a component, because people want different things
and you know the private sector can be very nimble. I think the question is how are you
going to try to ensure some basic level of quality. But frankly that's an issue for some
main stream universities. You know, as you know better than I do, it's just a tragedy.
I mean the hungry for learning in the Indian population is palpable, and the capacity of
universities is completely inadequate, just in terms of numbers and the quality of universities
is completely inadequate. Beyond a few elite schools, you know the IIT's, the Management
institutes, the IIM's.
So periodically the government will say we're going to create dozens of new great institutions
but you know you can't just snap your fingers and make it happen. They often don't have
the resources to do it, and right now there is a bill before the Indian parliament, and
I won't talk about India for too much longer but, foreign universities would like to come
in, it's a great market for them, different, some elites, some not elites and so far they've
been barred completely from setting up campus's. So it's really been a protectionist regime.
There is a bill, there is a higher education minister who is much more open to changing
things, but it's controversial. There have been questions about will the cast quotas
apply to foreign universities? And in particular, will they be allowed to repatriate money they
make? So clearly for the private sector if you can't tackle out profits, why are you
going to go in?
So I think there is a role for the private sector and in a place like India, there have
been huge strides in India. I mean you know, certainly in the broader economy the idea
of central planning is now out of vogue, and that's why India has grown in my view. I think
you need to bring that same sort of mentality to the higher education system.
[pause]
>>Person 2 from audience: I'd like to follow on from this very interesting question focusing
on Europe since that's where I'm from rather than India.
>>Ben: Where are you from?
>>Person 2 from audience: Italy. Um, you mentioned how German universities in particular are
in a crisis due to their very egalitarian model. That's not just Germany. Ok, France
may have kept a few bright sparks, um, Italy may have a few foreign like there is a Texas
A&M branch in Castiglion Fiorentino, John Hopkins one, just picking on a few you mentioned,
in Bologna. And so on, but they're really not working on a mass scale at all. The mass
will tend to the same egalitarian mediocrity and you mentioned the cultural suspicion.
Well, you don't know what cultural suspicion of America is until you've been to France,
which you have of course, but compared with that it's like, so I don't see any private
sector activity of course. I've been living in the US for a long time now so I may not
perceive everything that's going on. But while you hold out hope for the India's and other
emerging countries, is Europe which doesn't really, isn't really going to have a booming
economy any time, doesn't have anywhere as many young people and so on, going to be able
to attract any private initiative, any private investment the way you hold out for the future?
>>Ben: Well look, several things are going on in Europe which I think are encouraging.
I mean the first is that you're absolutely right, I mention Germany only because I was
trying to make the parallel with the 19th century. However, France, like Germany has
had this problem you know of, pretty, and I lived there for a couple of years, and you're
right I love France, but I'm well aware of its problems. I was there during the student
protests in 1986 which sort of dates me. They were talking about how they didn't want to
move to an American style system where as everyone knows only the rich goes to college
and this is when the student fees were going to go from 300 dollars a year to 350, which
was going to shut out countless, tens of thousands of students. So there were a lot of misperceptions.
But France is now trying to go beyond this egalitarian model, to create a competitive
funding model that is designed precisely to create a small group of world class institutions,
that they can show that they are really going to be worthy of the government funding.
The same thing is happening in Germany. So they're really trying to turn things around.
Italy has a place, you will probably know it better than I do, Bacconi University, which
is a private university, and they have a goal for example of, I'm not sure how close they
are of getting half of their faculty from overseas, within the next 5 or 10 years. So
they are very globally minded. And you also have something called the Bologna
Accord. Which is sort of a common market in education throughout Europe, trying to create
degrees that are compatible with each other. Standard three year degree. So it's easier
to move around. It's easier for employers to assess these degrees. And you can think
of it as the higher ed version of the Europe which I think is going to create some useful
ability to be mobile. So I think there are some promising things
going on in Europe. But you're right. Bologna was one of the seats of the creation of universities:
Paris, Bologna, Oxford. And it's a tragedy that it no longer has that...
>>Person 2 from audience: When the King of England wanted to establish a University,
in a place of so little distinction, that the best thing it was known for was that the
river was so shallow that even an oxen could ford.
What he did was go right to Bologna and steal the top academics. There was a lot of that
going on in the Middle Ages as well.
>>Ben: That's right, that's right.
>>Person 2 from audience: I'm from Bologna, that's why I'm so knowledgeable on the subject.
>> Ben: Ah, I understand. Ok
>> Person 3 from audience: Hi there, what is the role of the internet to help flatten
the world and make for the fluid transfer of information and people virtually at least
in all of this?
>> Ben: Gosh, I why don't I rap myself over the knuckles for not getting to that sooner.
You can't cover everything but again, there is a lot of that in the book.
>> Person 3 from audience: This is Google.
>> Ben: Sure. The internet is very important. I think that we are still in a period of experimentation.
MIT has what they call is "open courseware system" where they put all of their courses
up on the web. Although the president of Yale, there is a lot of trash talking, he says yeah,
they’re up on the web, but most of them are just a skeleton courses. Sometimes it's
a syllabus; sometimes it's more than that. Yale has much fewer courses, but they are
much more fully built out, with video and podcasts and so forth. So there are questions
about how you do it. The for-profits are also doing this in a very
big way. Some very high percentage of Australian students, excuse me, Chinese students studying
in Australian universities, a very high percentage are doing it online.
And you get into questions of what's the best model, fully online, or a combination of what
they call it "blended learning", sometimes they call it 'click and brick' like with Phoenix,
you'll go right by the freeway exit, because that's where they’ll put their sites, you
know, it's easy for working students, that's their population. You might go periodically
to have some classroom time, some face time, and a lot of it you will do whenever it's
good for you on your computer.
Clearly it has huge potential across borders. I think that you know, not everyone's gonna
want that. We already have a variety of models, and if you look at this country I think that's
one of our great strengths; you know, from the for-profit sectors, small but growing
fast, the open access community colleges, the state universities from the Berkeley's
and the UCLA's, to the CAL States, you know, east bay or San Francisco and there is a different
entry point for lots of people. Some of it's gonna be online, some of it's gonna be traditional,
and some people will sit around a tree reading Thucydides, which is great, I'm all for it.
In fact the Asian universities are very interested in our liberal arts tradition. Where we tend
to admire their ethos of work and perseverance and so forth, they look at us and they say
what's the secret sauce that makes the United States so innovative? And one of the answers
may be that people learn certain habits of mind, questioning what they're taught, and
you know, it's cliché but thinking outside the box, so to come back to online learning,
you know, people are going to be trying to grapple with ways to figure out what's the
optimal learning experience and I think that online for some people is going to be a part
of that. Thank you.
>>Maggie: Well on that note, thank you very much for coming to Google.
>>Ben: Thank you for having me.
[applause]