The Race Is On

It looks like a rock video. as techno music pounds in the background, attractive young Asians break-dance, play guitar and pump their fists in the air. Yet this is no dance track. It's an ad: part of the U.S. government's new campaign to attract Chinese students to U.S. colleges and universities. The video—which has been shown to more than 180 million Chinese TV viewers since November—also features students taking notes in class, playing in a marching band and cheerleading. The message: America loves Chinese students. It's the first time in history that Washington has actively marketed its education system overseas, says Frank Lavin, U.S. secretary for international trade, who is heading the campaign. "Attracting the best students from around the world is more competitive than ever," explains Lavin, "So we are making a special effort to reach out."

They're not the only ones. The days are long gone when the world's best schools—Harvard and Yale, Cambridge and Oxford—could rest on their laurels and expect the best students to come to them. Today, a variety of trends are utterly reshaping the educational landscape. Governments across the globe, especially in China and India, are pouring unprecedented sums into building and improving their universities, and are spending millions more selling them abroad. Europe is unifying its fractured system to make it more attractive. Private universities are springing up where they never existed, throughout developing nations. The stakes in the ever-tightening race could not be higher: with the numbers of internationally-minded students growing exponentially, schools and nations must do all they can to lure them in—both for economic and intellectual reasons. State funding for education is falling in many places, making those fee-paying foreigners look ever more attractive. And importing intellectual capital—or fighting brain drain—can pay off richly.

Ultimately, the winners in the new global education race will be those countries with institutions that are the most international at every level. They will boast multicultural student bodies, elite foreign campuses, offer internationally recognized degrees and, no matter where they're based, will teach in English—still very much the global language of business, research and technology.

For the moment, the United States remains the undisputed world leader, consistently occupying about half the spots in most global rankings of the top 100 universities. But it was also the United States that helped the competition grow so fierce. The attacks of September 11 led to tighter student-visa restrictions—and a widespread feeling that the United States no longer welcomed foreigners. The problem was compounded by a drop in government funding for public universities, weakening second-tier schools. In the three years following September 11, international student enrollment in the United States dropped by up to 2.4 percent a year—the first such losses in 32 years.

Now, however, the United States is rebounding. It's an important comeback: providing higher education to foreign students generated more than $14 billion for the U.S. economy in tuition and living expenses last year alone.

But although the raw numbers are up, some of the changes seem set to stick, and a multipolar educational world looks likely to be the new norm. The proof: America's share of the fast-growing pie of international students—more than 2.5 million people study overseas today—is shrinking. Among the top six host countries, the United States experienced the weakest growth between 2000 and 2005, pulling in just 17 percent more students over that period, compared with 81 percent in France and 108 percent in Japan, according to a recent report from the American Council on Education. In total, America's market share of international students dropped from more than a quarter in 2000 to one fifth in 2004, the latest year for which figures are available.