The Business of Learning
Along the United States’ eastern seaboard, a vine of socio-political elitism, academic expertise, and financial wealth has taken root. The eight privately run Ivy League universities it bears – Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, Brown, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania – have been responsible for the tertiary education of some of the world’s most influential politicians and thinkers. Harvard alone has seen the likes of Barack Obama, Ban Ki-moon, Benjamin Netanyahu and Bill Gates walk its red-brick corridors.
While these mainstays of private tuition have long made their presence felt on the international stage, their hegemony is threatened by the rising influence and changing nature of public institutions and schooling corporations. The resulting international education marketplace is rapidly blurring, if not eroding, the once dichotomous public-private pedagogy. Universities across the world – state-run or otherwise – are transforming into transnational actors, intent on harvesting a global crop of the young and well-educated.
Stepping over these sovereign borders, Western tertiary education has become a singular commodity, marketed by universities that can all, to some extent, be labelled ‘private’ in their economic aspirations. The extent of their influence raises some pertinent questions: how will it shape the next generation of world leaders and their international activities? And what evolutionary effects will this new kind of educational actor have on nation-states’ development, wellbeing and transnational capacities?
Selling the Product
As the Western world sways to the neoliberal rhythm of the 21st century, the liberal tenets of yesteryear’s welfare state – a system that popularised models of public, equitable schooling – have never appeared more irrelevant.
Peter Leuner and Mike Woolf write extensively on higher education’s new commoditised persona. They cite the U.S. government’s proposal to the World Trade Organisation in 2000 seeking the removal of national barriers to global provision, as “firmly locating international, ‘borderless’, or transnational education within the context of international trade”. This, they argue, has propagated a “knowledge economy” – and, I would further add, a Western knowledge economy – inhabited by for-profit corporations, or education management organisations (EMOs), and university shareholders with vested financial incentives in the international propagation of tertiary education.
As a result, the traditional private-public university binary is faced with a new third party contender: NASDAQ-traded organisations such as American InterContinental University, Stratford University, the U.S.-based Corinthian Colleges, Inc. and the UK’s BPP University College. While none of these can boast the tangible presence of Yale’s neo-gothic arches nor the leafy boulevards of Harvard, their entrance into the international education market and their financial raison d’être has accelerated competition with other privately operated institutions in securing the malleable minds of the world’s educated youth. Academic Benjamin Barber believes these are “the hallmarks of the new full-service university, which wants nothing so much as to be counted as a peer among the nation’s great corporations, an equal opportunism producer of prosperity and material happiness”.
Marketing the Brand
With any corporate rivalry comes an inevitable public relations propaganda struggle, one in which the United States’ nostalgic nationalism for the private institutions of its forefathers lends itself to the Ivy League enclave. As Princeton alumnus Walter Kirn writes, “Even though we learned nothing at Princeton that we couldn’t have learned elsewhere, the place gave us a calling card whose impact and power were undeniable. I assume it has opened doors for me, but none of the gatekeepers have said as much. I went to Princeton – a winning ticket in the social lottery.” The exclusivity of the Ivy League is a breeding ground for confidence, he says, which ultimately assists their alumni in slipping into the framework of elite Western society.
Research conducted by the University of Pennsylvania reveals some interesting statistics about the League’s ready-made brand: students who can afford the average $22,700 annual cost of tuition and board at the Ivy schools make up less than 1 per cent of the enrolment in the United States’ four-year colleges, yet “fifteen percent of the chief executives of the nation’s 800 largest corporations were Ivy League undergraduates”. This success extends into the national and international political sphere: 30 per cent of Barack Obama’s cabinet attended Ivy League schools, and an equal percentage of U.S. presidents were educated therein.
Overseas, the League continues to sew its badges upon the fabric of metropolitan centres and political leaderships: Columbia University has campuses in China, France, India and Jordan. Between them, the schools lay claim to former presidents and prime ministers of Italy, Turkey, Mexico, Germany, the Philippines, Chile, Peru, Israel, Taiwan, Iran and Brazil, not to mention the current UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and former European Union chief Romano Prodi.
Yet the rivalry between private universities and EMOs has concurrently spilled over the governmental bulwarks surrounding public education, as these institutions – once insulated by government support – evolve into international corporate actors. Entrenched distinctions between public and private quickly disintegrate within this competitive market arena, drawing the Ivy League and its public corollaries – Oxford and Cambridge, for example – closer together on the elite tertiary spectrum. There is an increasing push by state-funded universities to equally promote their brands, in order to claim a share of the financial spoils promised by the sons and daughters of the world’s socio-economic upper echelons.
Moreover, Woolf and Leuner believe that charging overseas students higher fees has led to “a shift from diplomacy towards commerce”. The fees lay the groundwork for profit, allowing public universities to shed full governmental support and, paradoxically, seek a supplement to state funding from international cheque books.
The advertising calibre of for-profit schools parallels public universities’ emergence into the marketing arena: tentative, but gathering strength, particularly in the U.S. where EMOs plant their seeds early among primary and secondary tuition. While criticism surrounding the commercialisation of education is rife, corporate promotion of cheaper undergraduate degrees, specialised learning, and greater academic investment continues to acquire strength. In fact, recent studies have found these corporate degrees to be more expensive than many public and private institutions. However, their popularity as flexible tertiary alternatives means that their presence will become ever more tangible in the international education market.
Privileging the System
While public universities open their doors to international students, the pervasive rhetorical power of the Ivy League – arguably the world’s most renowned private provision faction – ensures the success of its transnational prestige. Of the 4321 international students enrolled in Harvard for the 2010-11 academic year, 39 per cent were from Asia, followed by 27 per cent from Europe and 14 per cent from North America. The top five global state providers of students were Canada, China, South Korea, the UK and India. At Columbia, 90 countries are represented in its current undergraduate cohort, while more than 250,000 alumni are sprawled across the globe. Yale President Richard C. Levin asserts, “As Yale enters its fourth century, our goal is to become a truly global university, educating leaders and advancing the frontiers of knowledge not simply for the United States, but for the entire world.”
There is a kind of educational imperialism in the transnational propagation of private U.S. schools, and the increasingly prominent bastions of public institution in the UK. Cambridge has educated 25 foreign heads of government, including the incumbent leaders of India, Jordan, Singapore and Zambia, while the London School of Economics boasts those of Colombia, Denmark, Ghana, Greece, Kenya, Kiribati and Mauritius. Oxford’s alumni ranks are spread across the world – from Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi and Pakistan’s Bhutto dynasty to former Australia Prime Ministers Bob Hawke and Malcolm Fraser, and the United States’ Bill Clinton.
Does this encourage the rise of a new generation of world leaders, highly educated according to a Western tertiary system? Nankai University in China has recently undergone dramatic reconstruction, according to Hao Xin and Dennis Normile. The University is currently recruiting assistant and associate professors “from top tier institutions, including Yale University, Cornell University and the University of Oxford”. They report that the Chinese government has implemented a $U.S.1.3 billion scholarship program for students accepted by Western universities, arguing that recruiting national students with internationally awarded PhDs will enhance university quality.
However, the increasingly blurred distinction between universities presupposes the economic conditions for such a process to occur. For countries which lack the economic surplus either to fund quality local provision or draw their nationals back, this trend has a negative undercurrent. Leuner and Woolf believe that when the best of a nation’s potential leadership travel abroad to study, “the result is likely to be an increasing brain drain from the developing world to the developed”. Education is an inherently political process, they argue, as the nation-state’s capacity to engage effectively in international affairs and development rests upon a well-educated labour force.
Student migration from Eurasia and Africa to new ‘corporate’ universities may therefore have positive connotations. However, the lure of post-graduate employment in Western corporate behemoths could jeopardise any beneficial homecoming. There is a reciprocity of interest in the relationship between these international students aspiring for a share of Western education, and the institutions eager for the financial revenue such students can provide. It is a marriage of convenience which stabilises a global middle-upper class stratum, one which arguably threatens a greater socio-economic and geopolitical rift between developed and non-developed areas of the world.
While the cultural charisma of the Ivy League is etched deep in the woodwork of both the U.S. and global education arena, its members are increasingly being forced to compete in an international marketplace skirmish with for-profit and public institutions. How much longer will the notions of ‘private’ be draped with reverence upon them? Western education is essentially becoming a non-state corporate actor, traversing national borders and leaving a particular genus of tomorrow’s political, social and economic leaders in its wake.
Madeleine King is in her second year of a Bachelor of Arts (Media and Communications), majoring in Government and International Relations.
