The West Need Not Panic

Rapid growth in Asia and the Middle East has led many to conclude that U.S. economic hegemony is ending. Now one might ask if the same is happening to U.S. academic hegemony, as these regions make impressive investments in higher education.

For the moment, the United States still dominates, more decisively than it ever did the economy. America may produce 25 percent of the world's economic output, but it accounts for 40 percent of global spending on higher education and 35 percent on R&D. In 2005, it devoted 2.9 percent of its GDP to postsecondary schooling, while the EU, Japan, China and India spent less than 1.3 percent. Meanwhile, of the world's top 20 universities, between 12 and 16 (depending on how you count) are American.

Yet there are signs that U.S. pre-eminence may be softening. In the past two decades, thanks to the liberalization of student exchanges in the EU and aggressive recruiting by Australia and Singapore, the U.S. share of international students has dropped from about half the total in the 1980s to a third today.

At the same time, China has begun making staggering investments in its top schools; in Shanghai, for example, Fudan, Shanghai Jiao Tong and Tongji universities have all developed sprawling new campuses. The Gulf states are starting to spend hundreds of millions on branches of leading U.S. and European institutions. And perhaps most ambitiously, the Saudis are about to open the new King Abdullah University of Science and Technology with an endowment of at least $10 billion.

Catching the United States won't be easy. Harvard, Yale and Columbia are all developing new campuses, and Yale's capital budget for the next five years alone is more than $3 billion.

Ultimately, however, the reputation of universities is measured by the impact of their graduates and the contributions of their faculties. A rising school can move the first needle more quickly than the second. There's no shortage of smart students in China and India, and plenty of potential in the Middle East. But attracting and developing world-class researchers is a slow process. First-rate scholars prefer to work close to one another. "Start-ups" like Stanford and the University of Chicago took half a century or more to make it into the ranks of the nation's best.