The Race Is On

More evidence of the increased competition today can be found by looking at academia's most prestigious rankings. London's Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) and the Shanghai Jiaotong list are still dominated by Western institutions, with the United States consistently taking eight of the top 10 slots and Britain picking up the remaining two. But beyond the top 10, the rankings are more diverse. "There were no less than 30 different countries represented in our top 200 list this year, and I expect that number to keep growing," says John O'Leary, editor of the THES rankings. Indeed, Beijing University, the National University of Singapore and the University of Tokyo all won top 20 status in the most recent THES ranking.

The best of the challengers are building up their international programs with foreign outposts and joint degree programs. France's famed INSEAD business school, for example, now allows its students to move freely between its French campus and its Singapore location. The international slant has proved such a success that in June, INSEAD launched a joint M.B.A. with China's Tsinghua University.

More and more schools are taking a similar approach. In May, a report by the American Council on Education found that 131 private Indian colleges have established links to foreign universities, and nearly half of Britain's higher-education institutions provide study opportunities in China. Among the dozens of universities with campuses, research labs or partnerships in Singapore are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago and Cornell. This internationalization, says the IIE's president, Allan Goodman, is exactly what all universities need to stay competitive. "Campuses should have their own foreign policies," he says, "and require every undergraduate to get a passport instead of a student ID."

Having a physical presence abroad is more important than ever. Asian countries, the biggest exporters of foreign students to the West, are now pouring resources into homegrown schools in a bid to prevent brain drain. Today, China spends an estimated 0.5 of its annual GDP on higher education, but it plans to bring that share up to 4 percent in coming years—a figure higher than both Europe's 1.1 percent and the United States' 2.7 percent. Earlier this year, Malaysia announced its goal of becoming an international education hub with 100,000 foreign students—double today's number—by 2010. To lure the best professors, Singapore's universities are offering salaries competitive with the best U.S. schools; young academics in the city-state can now earn more than $180,000 a year.

To sweeten the deal for students, many of Asia's most cutting-edge institutions have also started offering entire degrees in English. This is threatening one of the greatest advantages enjoyed by the United States and the United Kingdom. Today's youths are often as keen to gain English fluency as a topnotch diploma; indeed, a European Commission report last year found that Europe's "single major disadvantage in the eyes of Asian students is that English is not the universal mother tongue." To improve their attractiveness, many of Asia's universities are, therefore, adopting English. In South Korea, Underwood International College, Korea University and Ewha Womans University all recently created English-only undergraduate programs. Japan's Waseda University has run an English college since 2004. And many of China's top schools, including Beijing University, are increasing their English-language course offerings every year.

These efforts are paying off, as evidenced by the number of new institutions popping up throughout Asia. Consider this: China has expanded its university system so quickly that more than 20 percent of its college-age population now receives tertiary education—up from less than 2 percent a generation ago. Or this: last month India held its first formal meeting, chaired by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, to plan the $1 billion revival of the country's great ancient university, Nalanda, which was last open in A.D. 1197. "The pace at which China and India are creating higher-education institutions is quite astounding," says Bernd Wachter, director of the Brussels-based Academic Cooperation Association. "And it's not just quantity, it's quality." Indeed, the new institutions are already proving so successful that the EU's commissioner for Education warned in a recent interview that British, French and German universities risk being "overtaken" by those in China and India within a decade if they don't modernize.