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The Dream Factories

The world’s universities and colleges are in turmoil. In a little over a generation, they have been transformed from training grounds for professionals, the curious, the gifted, and the wealthy into expensive extensions of high schools, designed to educate a broad range of people and prepare them for stable middle-class opportunities. The transformation has its roots in the post–World War II era, starting in the USA with opportunities for returned servicemen, then growing there and elsewhere during the 1950s and 1960s with the “space race” and the search for sustained economic growth.

The dream of universities as the guaranteed road to prosperity—an idea that grew first and fastest in North America—delivered on what it promised, at least at the beginning. An expanding professional and scientific economy produced many opportunities for young adults, who found that a college degree provided a reliable and useful ticket to the middle class. The convergence between post-secondary studies and employment opportunities, while not ideal, was nonetheless impressive and, for those intellectually and financially able to consider college, rewarding. But the result has been an institutional sea-change. Universities, once “ivory towers,” have increasingly become Dream Factories, educational institutions dependent for their revenues and thus their existence on selling their product—their dream—to an ever-wider audience.

The Growth of Mass Education

The roots of the current situation go back about a hundred years. In 1900, college education was restricted to a tiny minority of the population, and even a high school education was not common: in the United States in about 1900, fewer than 5 percent of the population graduated from high schools, which often had entrance examinations and charged fees. After World War I, governments in the industrial world, especially in the United States, accepted the premise that economic prosperity required an educated and well-trained workforce. All over the industrialized world, governments invested in a massive expansion of elementary and secondary school education. Countries moved quickly toward universal schooling, ensuring that young boys and girls had the rudiments of writing, arithmetic, and basic civics. This happened at different times in different countries: in the UK, for example, it did not occur until after World War II. Many children moved from classroom to the industrial workforce, even in their early teens, but societies declared mass education to be an essential prerequisite for a modern economy. From a standing start in the mid-nineteenth century, public elementary education expanded rapidly to become virtually commonplace, at least in the world’s wealthier countries.

In the 1960s and after, as the complexity of the modern world increased, societies doubled down on the educational commitment. Publicly funded, universally accessible high school education came into vogue worldwide, as it had already done in the United States. Governments that had invested massively in elementary school classrooms and teachers now raced to build high schools to accommodate the millions of teenagers seeking a high school education. The systems varied, with Germany leading the way in incorporating industrial and skills training in the advanced school system, and countries like the USA, the UK, and Japan focusing more on general education. But the expansion of the high school system was remarkable, with millions of children who, in previous generations, would have entered the workforce in their early teens, continuing their studies at an advanced level. By the 1970s, high school participation had become as commonplace as going to elementary school had been two generations earlier. By the 1990s, in countries like the USA, Canada, the UK, Japan, South Korea, and across Scandinavia, university became the new preoccupation, with governments opening up millions of spaces for young people anxious to join the expanding professional class. Mass education had more than arrived; it had leapt up the age ladder into the early twenties.

The resulting global university system is an incredible mishmash, with public and private institutions of widely differing quality, and now, particularly in the United States, for-profit schools as well. The University of Phoenix is the flag-bearer for this quintessential contemporary private-sector institutional model. It is listed on NASDAQ, has produced many millions of dollars of profit for its shareholders, provides student-centric education, without spending money on such things as academic graduate programs or faculty research. Courses are offered where and when students want to take them, not according to faculty biorhythms and preferences. It is also now the largest university in the United States, with close to four hundred thousand students. The University of Phoenix’s parent organization—the Apollo group—is one of a substantial number of for-profit educational deliverers, including the American InterContinental University, Capella University, and Walden University, several of which have expanded operations internationally.

Not all for-profit institutions have operated ethically, particularly in the USA. The University of Phoenix has run into substantial difficulties, closing many physical campuses, facing legal challenges, and seeing its stock price plummet. Several private universities figured out how to capitalize on the generous Pell Grants, a program expanded by President Obama to ensure that any student who could spell “university” got to go. Unscrupulous recruiters convinced students to sign up for expensive for-profit education, without telling them that they had to pay back any money borrowed under the system. The for-profit movement has expanded internationally, with new institutions springing up from Malaysia (Multimedia University) to Grenada (St. George’s University) and Spain (Universidad Europea de Madrid), as well as elsewhere. With governments rushing to meet demand in most countries, it is not clear how much further the for-profit movement will spread at present.

New technologies have accelerated the growth even more. Massive online and distant-education universities, with student populations counted in the hundreds of thousands, offer hundreds of degrees to off-campus learners. If participation and enrolment are proper markers of success, students love them. The largest institutions, located in India, Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey, have over a million students. Many of these universities have tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of enrollees, all studying online and most working toward a university degree. Not a great deal is known about the quality and career impact of these institutions. Suffice it to say that digital technology is allowing governments to deliver advanced learning to literally millions of students who would not otherwise be able to attend a standard university. If a student from Pakistan presented a degree from Anadolu University in Turkey, how many employers would know that this institution, with over one million students, served only twenty-two thousand students on-site and educated the rest at a distance? Would it matter? Academics debate and study the quality of the online learning experience and have yet to reach an absolute consensus about the utility of this type of education. For governments unable to cover the costs of regular universities, and for students unable to participate in standard education processes, distance learning is a godsend.

While college conversions, distance education, and private universities all played a role in the growth of the post-secondary system, one of the greatest contributors to university expansion came from institutions already in place. From the 1960s onward, existing universities the world over built new facilities to house the influx of students who swarmed onto campuses and to provide research space for the faculty hired to teach them. (Politicians like new campus buildings almost as much as they celebrate expansion in student numbers.) Money was forthcoming for the laboratories, libraries, classrooms, residences, and other facilities deemed essential for the modern research-intensive university. The results were often spectacular. Moscow State University, operating since the eighteenth century, has grown to an amazing complex of over a thousand buildings covering some one million square metres, more than 40 percent larger than the Pentagon, the world’s largest office building. In many instances—the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia being one of the latest examples—governments and donors have produced eye-popping architectural masterpieces to grace university campuses. In the vast majority of the cases, however, the buildings had the aesthetic of a nineteenth-century prison or an early twentieth-century factory. Only rarely has design overcome financial considerations, resulting in a network of institutions that lack the intellectual impact of the stunning artistry of the facilities at the University of Leuven, the cold rigour of Cambridge, the majesty of Duke, or the dignity of college campuses like Swarthmore, Middlebury, and Dartmouth.

Declining Standards

These places differ profoundly in history, design, and ambiance, but they are all Dream Factories, institutions devoted to a simple concept: guaranteeing a successful life to those who pay to attend them. Their promotional materials, full of photographs of happy students studying with classmates and enjoying the bucolic campus life, promise great careers and a golden ticket to the middle class. They are the quintessential institution of the twenty-first-century knowledge economy, tackling the challenges of the high-tech, globalized economy and the realities of an international workforce in rapid transition.

It took close to a century for high school graduation to become almost universal in first-world countries. Regular schooling did not suit all students equally, particularly those who were inclined toward the skilled trades. Governments generally did not fund high schools equally, resulting in substantial educational gaps among poor, rural, and minority populations. Equally, the rapid expansion of the post–World War II industrial economy, which drew heavily on low-skilled and semi-skilled labour in the factories and construction trades, meant that it was still possible, in the 1950s and 1960s, for young people, particularly men, to make a good living without a high school education. Many left high school without graduating, often following their fathers’ paths to plants, mines, or construction sites. The gathering strength of unions, combined with an abundance of low-skill/high-wage work, ensured that these jobs paid well and carried generous benefits. As a result, high school graduation rates did not rise as rapidly as early high school attendance.

The situation became more complicated by the early twenty-first century, as a pattern of “social passes,” particularly in the United States and Canada, produced a steadily increasing number of high school graduates who got through school without learning much of anything. Consider these depressing facts. Among American high school graduates, only 40 percent have age-appropriate reading skills and only 25 percent have appropriate mathematical skills.[1] The situation in Canada is not much better. The high school completion rate has increased in recent years for a number of reasons, one of them being massive government encouragement to stay in school; another presumably being a lowering of standards for graduation. The percentage of young adults (age twenty-five to thirty-four) who have “attained at least upper secondary education” is, according to the OECD, fairly even across Western industrialized countries, with Canada, at 92 percent, having one of the highest completion rates. In comparison, the percentage of Americans who graduate stands at 89. In both Turkey and Mexico it is 46 percent.[2]

Japan and Germany have higher and more standardized academic accomplishments, as do South Korea, Finland, Singapore, and Taiwan. In China, a country that has made massive investments in high school education over the past thirty years, educational fraud and manipulation of transcripts is so widespread as to make it difficult to assess educational achievement. Many Chinese proudly carry high school diplomas that provide no assurance that they have the abilities and learning that have, since World War II, been associated with a high school degree. But, of course, the same is true in the United States.

College and university education is now replicating the high school experience. A new focus on higher education has occurred as job opportunities for high school dropouts have declined and opportunities for high school graduates have shrunk in the face of the collapsing power of trade unions and the disappearance of traditional low-skill/high-wage work. Naturally and inexorably, governments, parents, and young people have begun to focus on post-secondary education.

The inflation in education has been steady. Before 1920, most students stopped their studies after elementary school. Before the 1960s, they stopped after high school. In the last third of the twentieth century, in a fit of educational optimism that gripped much of the world, attention shifted to community colleges, colleges, and universities, with the latter representing the gold standard for those who felt that they had the skills, determination, and ability to prosper. A quick look at the same industrial nations illustrates the degree to which college and university preparation swept the wealthiest countries.

As with the high school systems after World War II, the colleges and universities took in many more students than they graduated. The percentage of those not finishing increased over time, primarily because the standards of the advanced educational institutions proved to be less flexible than the high schools’. This is an important point. Governments rejoice that 90 percent of the population has at least a high school education, but we may ask this question: How much of an achievement is it to earn a qualification that nine-tenths of the population also earns? High school graduation is almost universal in a country such as Canada and even more so in Scandinavia, South Korea, Singapore, and Japan. Largely because of public, government, and parental pressure, high schools have lowered educational standards to ensure more students graduate—literate and numerate or, in the case of all too many, not. For the time being (with variations between institutions), colleges and universities have maintained higher academic standards and resisted the pressure—also from the public, governments, parents, and students—to pass those who fail to meet clear and objective standards of academic achievement.

Higher Education Generates Mixed Reviews

Not surprisingly, universities generate mixed reviews. Some people, like President Obama, believe that universities are central to personal success and national prosperity. Enthusiasm is particularly strong among organizations of university presidents and teachers. Andrew Hacker, a well-known American “public intellectual” and emeritus professor of political science at Queen’s College, New York, baldly states that “everyone has the capacity to succeed at college and benefit from what it has to offer.” “All young people,” he says, and he puts the word in italics, have “knowledge-thirsty minds that can be awakened and encouraged to examine the world they inhabit.”[3] Others are more skeptical and are beginning to question the contribution that those currently being urged to get a degree will make to economic, social, and cultural success. Angela Merkel, solid where Obama wanders into the fantasy world of Garrison Keller’s Lake Wobegone (where everyone is above average), demonstrates the uncertainty and caution of a thoughtful leader:

We have committed a lot of resources to increasing interest in mathematical, engineering and scientific training courses, and will continue to do so. We have too few students, rather than too many, in these subjects. If we wish to maintain prosperity and living standards in our countries, it thus behooves us to encourage the enjoyment of science education. Taking a degree in the natural and engineering sciences is considered to be rather precarious. In terms of career prospects, experience has repeatedly shown that whilst the take-up of people trained in these professions is very good during economically buoyant periods, during a recession these people will experience considerable difficulties in finding a job. This is why it is also the job of business and education institutions to ensure there is a permanent shoring up, so to speak, of career prospects for graduates from the mathematics and natural science disciplines. Scientific knowledge has a very short sell-by-date, which is why we cannot afford to have gaps in the provision of qualified scientists.[4]

A smaller number are increasingly skeptical about university education. Few are as blunt as Simon Dolan, United Kingdom multi-millionaire high school dropout and author of How to Make Millions Without a Degree: And How to Get By Even If You Have One:[5] “I feel University only prepares students for a very specific set of circumstances. I’m not sure if it robs them of life skills, but it certainly delays the point at which they attain those life skills. By life skills, I mean work skills, be that in an office or in a factory or whatever—the key is that work skills can only be learned through real work. These are skills that you don’t learn from a book; you learn them by getting out there and doing them.” Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, has gone a step further, offering to pay young people $100,000 to not attend university for two years and instead to pursue their business ideas. As Thiel, who believes that universities are oversold and headed for a crash, told TechCrunch in 2011, “A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”

The more young people who go, or who ponder going, to college, the louder the debate grows. On one side, people claim that those with university degrees make more money in their lifetimes than those without them (true as an average, but not for individuals, and each would-be student is an individual). The case is forcefully put, with charts, by Mark Gongloff in The Huffington Post.[6] The contrary case is made by two scholars in a paper published by the Brookings Institution,[7] an argument that we will explore in a later chapter.

The debate about the value of a university education is carried on worldwide. In Vietnam, Pham Chi Lan, the former president of the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry, is a dynamo, with an energy and verve that belies her seventy-plus years. Her keynote address to the hundred or so academics and government officials gathered in a posh Hanoi hotel to discuss the Asian innovation environment contradicted all the stereotypes of an officially Communist state. Vietnam, she said, was taking on the world. The country had what it took to succeed: the prodigious work ethic of the people married with foreign investment, government support, and Vietnamese ingenuity.

She flashed charts and tables about competitive pricing, low labour costs, and urban developments, the like of which few countries outside China have attempted, as well as a regulatory environment that was becoming more capitalist by the month. She spoke about the application of new scientific and technological discoveries to Vietnamese agriculture and fisheries and described the country’s efforts to attract high-technology businesses. She wowed the audience, as much by her confidence and determination as by the clearly promotional tour of Vietnam’s new economy. People were impressed.

During the question period, a visiting scholar asked about something she had not covered in the speech: the role of university research and university graduates in Vietnam’s innovation efforts. It was a standard question, likely to draw a standard answer. The audience knew that national innovation systems draw on the powerful combination of the academy, government, and business to prepare a country for global competitiveness and prosperity. They also knew that the Vietnamese government was investing heavily in research and post-secondary education. A science city under development within a dozen miles of the conference hotel had attracted a $1 billion in investment and would, if finished as planned, host over a million people in a new economic powerhouse. The once-isolationist government had even permitted foreign institutions, led by Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, to set up operations in both Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. The audience relaxed, ready for the latest morale-boosting tribute to the modern university. They were in for a shock.

To the surprise of the audience, Pham stepped aside from the podium—almost as tall as she was—and launched into a savage critique of Vietnam’s universities. She described them as next to useless. Their researchers did little work that had any value to the business community or to the country. The business community clamored for graduates with practical skills, while the universities produced young people with traditional classical educations. As a result, businesses rarely looked to universities to help solve commercial problems. The government was unhappy with the return on their investment. Her diatribe dripped with frustration and criticism of an ossified and unproductive university system. The audience, unused to the spectacle of an Asian leader dissecting a national institution in public, was uncharacteristically quiet. The academics among them all believed as a matter of faith that universities were central to dreams of national prosperity. Was there really something wrong with the country’s universities? Or was it simply that this businesswoman failed to appreciate the many benefits of university training and research to an emerging economy?

Some 3,500 miles west of Hanoi, on the edge of a desert, another nation had a different approach. In the ultra-modern, energy boom-town of Doha, Qatar, two young hijab-clad women offered a portrait of the role of universities and university graduates in their country’s future. Education City, located less than ten miles from Doha’s city centre, demonstrated how fossil-fuel revenues can drive national change. Because the country’s little-known University of Qatar lacked the global prestige and scientific expertise of foreign universities, the country opted to buy skill and status rather than build it slowly from within. The Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, extremely well funded and with strong political connections, sponsored the initiative, seeking to vault Qatar’s university system from virtually nowhere into international prominence.

The multi-billion dollar campus made itself available for a number of programs offered by first-rate international institutions. Virginia Commonwealth University offered a fine arts program. Cornell University delivered a medical program and Texas A&M gave students a chance to study chemical, electronic, mechanical, and petroleum engineering. Business and computer science degrees were available through Carnegie Mellon University, with Northwestern University offering journalism and communication studies, and Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service delivering its prestigious foreign service degree. HEC Paris, one of the top-ranked business schools anywhere, provided executive education programs and another of the world’s great universities, University College of London, delivered graduate degrees in museum and heritage studies. A national university program—the Qatar Faculty of Islamic Studies—operated on the site. Nearby, in one of the most unusual international initiatives anywhere, the College of the North Atlantic from Newfoundland offered a full range of college and trades programs in a $2 billion campus.

The billions pumped into this university by the Qatari government have bought some pretty impressive facilities. The campus is designed to minimize the effects of the 35+°C (95+°F) temperatures—during the cool season—and to show off the educational opportunities available for Qatar’s elite students. A well-designed student service centre offers everything from a bowling alley to high-end gyms and swimming pools (separate ones for women and men). No harsh words here for the unique Education City experiment, which government officials and business leaders praise endlessly and finance at a remarkable level, with high standards but the constraints that are common in a Middle Eastern nation.

The two students assigned to take a small group of visitors around Education City lauded the facilities. The participating universities, they said proudly, were among the best in the world. They explained how each international participant tried to replicate the culture and ambiance of its home institution by ensuring that top-quality faculty taught the classes, and that the educational standards were the same as at home. Both students had started in Cornell’s pre-medicine program, but found the courses not to their liking. They opted instead for Texas A&M’s engineering degree. Bright, engaging, and well informed, the students fit in comfortably with the unusual mixture of Qatari nationals, home campus visitors, and foreign students studying at Education City.

Their take on Education City could not have been more different from the Vietnamese business leader’s condemnation of her country’s university system. The satellite campuses brought prestige and opportunity to Qatar. Neither one of them, they said, would have been permitted by their parents to study outside the country. Yet the national university lacked the stature and credibility their parents sought for them. The satellites offer them the benefits of a foreign education without having to leave home. As was the norm for Qataris, neither student wanted for much—both were chauffeured to and from the campus each day—and neither one would have been out of place in a top-flight university located elsewhere in the world. Obviously smart, they knew that they were preparing for one of the most lucrative employment markets in the world. They chuckled when asked if they worried about finding work after graduation. Both had high-paying jobs lined up, even though they were still in their third year.

Vietnam and Qatar represent polar opposites of the current university reality: on one hand, damning criticism of a system that is poorly connected to the national business community and underperforming from an economic perspective, and on the other, praise for institutions that promise to produce the leaders and commercial discoveries of tomorrow.

World Hunger for the Dream

Like a storm gathering its strength from the ocean’s energy, the tempest bearing down on the universities takes its energy from young people’s yearnings for a good and prosperous life. It is as regular and predictable as the tides. Every year, all over the world, seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds perform a ritual. Its details differ from country to country, but there is a common goal: to ensure success in life by getting into a top university. In Japan, students work themselves into exhaustion studying for nation-wide high school–leaving examinations. When the results are posted (and in Japan they are posted publicly), careers and lives are made or blighted, because the tests determine which students get into the best schools and which ones are destined for the factory floor. The winners in Britain’s endless educational class wars emerge from their A-level tests, heading for the top schools, while the losers go on to less prestigious institutions or directly into the low-paid workforce. American parents hire advisors, letter-writers, and test coaches to help their offspring work through the maze of college and university admission procedures. In China, where until recently only 2 percent of high school graduates got into a domestic university, wealthy parents set aside up to $200,000 to give their child a shot at completing a four-year degree overseas. South African students, particularly black youngsters struggling to overcome the legacy of apartheid, are desperate to get into an institute of higher learning.

In most African nations, where only a minority gets to go to high school and only a fraction of these have the chance to go to university, the pursuit of a post-secondary education is usually a distant dream, dependent on personal connections. Harvard accepts about 7 percent of those who apply, but that is almost an open-entry institution compared to the situation in India. Indian students compete through rigorous examinations for a place in the Indian Institutes of Technology, campuses with such intense competition for entry that they make the admissions standards at Harvard and Oxford look easy in comparison. In 2012, half a million people wrote the national IIT entrance exam, and the success rate was 2 percent.[8] At Nanjing University of China, one of the top schools in an education-hungry nation, fewer than 1 percent of applicants are accepted, making it even tougher to get into than the IITs.

Ever wonder why people attach a premium to top institutions? The race to get in is a key reason. At many of the world’s universities, high school graduation and the ability to pay tuition is sufficient for entry. Take it for granted that students are not banging down the doors to get into the University of Kinshasa, currently ranked 5,959th in the world (but top of the mountain in the Congo). Not surprisingly, parents who want their children to get into the top institutions invest heavily in entrance-examination preparation and pre-testing exercises. In contrast, South Korea and Taiwan, like the United States, have places for almost every high school graduate; there is intense competition for a handful of elite schools, but it’s easy to get into one of the public and private universities in the country. Germany, in contrast, identifies academic potential early on, moving high-quality students into academic streams in their early teens and herding the less bookish into technical and trades programs.

This being the age of universities, however, there are always workarounds. Cannot get into the University of Chicago law school? Go to the University of Windsor, not so far away in Canada and less than a quarter the cost. Turned down for medical school at USC or UCLA? Why not try the University of Guadalajara, which uses the same curriculum and many of the same instructors? Cannot get into a prime law school in the United Kingdom or Canada? The private Bond University—one of the few places named after a convicted felon—offers internationally transportable law degrees. One of the simple truths of this age is that all universities are not created equal and that students in pursuit of a specific credential can often find it—for a price—somewhere in the world.

But universities have some tricks up their sleeves, particularly when governments insist on accessibility as a prime value. Some countries—the Netherlands and Portugal being good examples—believe that accessibility to university is as much of a right as high school attendance. Institutions cope with this intellectually irrational proposition by making a simple point: admission is not a guarantee of graduation. So institutions and programs in high demand among entering students—engineering, design, digital media, and other market-ready programs are currently popular—admit hundreds and hundreds of students, then use the first-year experience to cull the number to a manageable level. Second-year cohorts, entrance to which is closely guarded by program directors, might be limited to 10 percent or fewer of the first-year students. Students who fail to meet the threshold—and clearly they are numbered in the many hundreds—are redirected to lower-demand (and often lower-quality) programs. If the university does not need the extra bodies to cover institutional costs, having sucked government grants and often tuition fees from the first-year students, they can simply let the students leave the university.

The success of colleges and universities in North America has produced many global imitators over the past three decades. While countries with strong resource economies lagged behind—largely because of the continuation of high-wage/low-skill work—nation after nation invested in the rapid expansion of its college and university system. The growth in the wealthier nations was dramatic, building off an institutional base that, in some quarters, was hundreds of years old.

But consider what has occurred at the same time in the developing world. The colonial powers created universities in their overseas possessions, usually training the children of elite families to take their place in the colonial business and governance systems and sending the best of them back to institutions in the mother country. These former colonies, struggling to adjust to industrial competition and globalization, have seized on advanced education as a means of achieving individual and collective prosperity. With many of these countries coping with widespread poverty, serious infrastructure challenges, and limited government resources, distance-education systems and online educational delivery have provided a means of extending advanced education to villages and towns outside of the capital cities. The result has been a massive global increase in the total number of universities and university students.

This expansion has been fraught with irony and contradiction. The colonial powers financed the early stages of the system and trained many faculty and staff members who subsequently found work in developing world institutions. Industrial-world philanthropy, often through global governance organizations such as the United Nations, UNESCO, the World Bank, and private donors, provided further assistance to the international effort. When the system worked—and there were many individual and institutional success stories among a global university system marked by serious inconsistencies in standards and effectiveness—these colleges and universities converted bright young students into globally competitive graduates. To put it bluntly, the leading universities in the leading industrial nations trained their competitors, transferring a significant portion of the educational advantage enjoyed by the West to the emerging economies. India is an excellent example of this process in action. This act of educational philanthropy improved the global economy, strengthening the training in these countries through lifelong commercial and professional contacts with their graduates. Overall, the primary impact was to improve their economic prospects dramatically.

At the individual level, the growing universities of India, China, and other countries are classic Dream Factories, converting potential into achievement and opportunity into personal success, though not necessarily at home. Africa, in recent years, has seen upwards of thirty-five thousand of its best-trained graduates leave the continent each year for further study in first-world institutions or jobs in wealthier countries. Turkey has, over the past decade, financed a ferocious expansion of its university system, focusing largely on engineering and technology, predicated on the belief that these graduates will find work in the European Union, send money home, and eventually return to bolster the country’s economy. Worldwide, more than 4.5 million students are enrolled in university-level education outside their home country, a number that is predicted to rise to 8 million by 2025.[9] The country with the highest percentage of international students studying in its universities is, perhaps surprisingly, Australia—surprising until one thinks of its geographical location.

One of the imperatives behind studying overseas is the idea, particularly strong in China, that young graduates would either enjoy a decided employment advantage when they returned home, or would be able to gain a working visa that could lead to permanent residency in the country of their education. Nations such as Canada, the United States, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom have for several decades capitalized on the talent and education of foreign-born students to buttress their economies, particularly in high-technology sectors.

The commitment to college and university expansion has rested on more than the opportunities for personal advancement. Many countries, observing closely the success of scientific and technological innovation in North America, Japan, East Asia, and northern Europe, and desiring rapid economic expansion, concluded that major commitments to an education and research-rich society would produce favourable economic outcomes for the society as a whole. Countries that had lagged far behind in competitiveness and productivity caught up rapidly. Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea, to use East Asian examples, were transformed as the rapid improvement of the education system underpinned an increasingly technologically proficient society. Other countries, from Finland to Israel, also capitalized on the advanced education of their citizens to create globally competitive economies, in both of these cases underpinned by high-technology industries.

By the early twenty-first century, almost every country in the world believed that national prosperity rested on an expansion of the post-secondary system. The commitment to national innovation through advanced education and basic research became a global mantra, adopted from Greenland to Botswana, with policy manifestations in most nations. (This phenomenon raises the question of how national innovation policies can be “innovative” when they are the same everywhere, copying standard global practice.) The explosion in the number of universities, the number of students, the number of graduates, the number of postgraduate students, the number of faculty members, the amount of research activity and expenditures, and the volume of academic publication has been truly impressive.

Indeed, recent estimates suggest that the knowledge base in the world doubles every five years, a growth rate that boggles the mind. If the total volume of knowledge (judged by published research) stood at 100 in 1980—near the real starting point of the global expansion of universities and colleges—then it would have increased to 12,800 in 2015—128 times in a generation. Some of this research is in fields of no economic importance, that will never reach more than a handful of readers—there have been many thousands of scholarly publications about William Shakespeare in the past few decades[10] —but the significance in computer science, engineering, medicine, and other practical fields is considerable.[11] So, the results are impressive: more students, more research, more publications and, as a quick look around the modern economy demonstrates, rapid technological and commercial innovation.

But there is no linear or simple relationship between post-secondary education and economic advancement. Consider the characteristics of the following country:

Population: 11.2 million

Trading population within a three-hour flight: 500+ million

High school graduation rate: 94 percent

Number of universities and colleges: 47

Total student enrolment: 112,000

Number of medical graduates: 10,500 (half are international students)

By any global standard, this country is perfectly aligned for global competitiveness and leadership in the new economy. But the nation languishes, with a per-capita income that is only 10 percent of that of the United States,[12] 22 major deficiencies in infrastructure, high unemployment, and large-scale overseas employment of the country’s well-trained professionals. The country is Cuba, an ideologically frozen country caught in a half-century-long conflict with the United States that is only now warming. Mass advanced education has not saved Cuba from the dual burdens of ideology and politics. Much the same is true of Russia, a nation with a distinguished history of mathematical and scientific education and high participation rates—but with a cramped economy. Mass education is no guarantee of national economic success, especially when trumped by politics.

The outcomes of mass education are similar in many emerging economies as well. China has doubled its university and college system to about 2,400 institutions in the past ten years. In 2014, China graduated 7.26 million students from its universities, seven times the number of 1999.[13] Around 9 percent of Chinese have at least some college education, twice the percentage in 2000. In 2012–2013 there were a quarter of a million Chinese students studying at American universities.[14] At present, its university graduates are facing high rates of underemployment and unemployment, since there is a misalignment of the national economy and the education provided to Chinese youth. Put simply, the country does not have enough middle-management positions or even technology-based jobs for the young people streaming out of the universities. Remember those students going overseas to get an international degree? They are referred, upon returning to China, as haigui or sea turtles, and find that their degrees are not an assured ticket to career opportunities.

Chinese university graduates are not alone. South Korea has one of the highest university participation rates in the world (80 percent of high school graduates continue on to university). The country has some 3 million (as of 2014) inactive university graduates, because, policy-makers believe, of the oversupply of job-hungry young people. Steadily rising unemployment rates among university graduates have started to level off in Japan. But the country continues to wrestle with a massive oversupply of PhDs, many of them in the high-technology, computing, and engineering jobs that are supposed to be at the centre of the technologically-rich “new economy.” Singapore, with a robust economy, still saw graduate unemployment jump significantly, if only to 3.6 percent. Unlike other countries, however, the government responded by capping total university enrolment in Singapore at 25 percent of the high school graduating class.[15]

Nigeria, on the other hand, with about six hundred thousand university and college students in 2010 (down substantially from three years earlier),[16] has created a system wracked by corruption, mismanagement, and low quality. About a third of school-age children are not in school. The system is so dysfunctional that alert employers and universities in other parts of the world discount Nigerian grades and credentials substantially. The situation is similar in Egypt and other North African states that bit into the golden apple of post-secondary education. They have discovered that a functioning higher education system cannot be wished into existence in the absence of a strong national infrastructure, no matter how badly their citizens want to attend university, and that in any case the regional economy cannot accommodate most of the system’s graduates.

So, for every Israel and Finland, both advanced countries that prospered through education-driven growth, or Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea, which built twenty-first-century economies off advanced education and training, there are others like Greece, Vietnam, India, Egypt, Zambia, Spain, South Africa, Nigeria, and Mexico that have not yet seen the growth expected from unleashing a flood of university graduates into the economy. In Portugal, the graduates from a large and academically solid university system cannot find work in the moribund national economy. Instead, they look to France, Germany, and Brazil for employment, as their working-class parents and grandparents did in earlier times. This has not stopped the expansion, however, because parents and young people alike still consider a college or university degree as the most promising—even if not assured—path to a comfortable life. The dream is international.

The Learning = Earning Equation

Why the enthusiasm for higher education? There are three basic reasons: first, sustained evidence that a university degree produces highly beneficial results, if not for everyone, then at least on average; second, major shifts in the industrial workforce; third, changing attitudes toward work in the contemporary world. We will discuss the first reason in detail later, but for now we note the following: there is substantial statistical evidence that students with degrees (especially if they have more than one degree) fare much better on average in the modern workforce than people who lack such degrees. Some reasons for this are obvious: doctors make more money than retail clerks and they require more than one degree in most countries; teachers generally have higher incomes than taxi drivers; and engineers enjoy better salaries than hairdressers. Those who went through universities and colleges in the 1950s and 1960s—when there were not many graduates and when the expanding economy desperately required hundreds of thousands of managers and easily trained white-collar workers—have generally been blessed with stable employment, decent incomes, and middle-class lives, at least in the leading industrial nations.

It is important to note, however, the qualification “on average.” The equation Learning = Earning is not universally true. Graduates in the fine arts do not make more money than unionized heavy-duty mechanics or workers in the oilfields, and many other similar comparisons could be made. Ask the 25 percent of retail workers or the 15 percent of taxi drivers in the United States who held college degrees in 2010.[17] The American Bureau of Labor Statistics gives a surprising estimate of the number of other “low-skill” jobs held by college graduates: 1 in 6 bartenders, 1 in 4 amusement park attendants, and 1 in 5 telemarketers all have at least one degree.

Some of this has carried forward into the 2010s. Graduates in fields in high demand continue to enjoy wage premiums and diverse opportunities for work, while the prospects for those pursuing general degrees and study in fields disconnected from the workforce (Film Studies, anyone?) have diminished in recent years. Nor are degrees from all colleges worth the same in the workforce. Contrast the contemporary career prospects of a Yale graduate in economics or finance or a Harvard graduate in law on the one hand, with those of someone with a Bachelor of Science in Biology from North Arizona University. Or those of an engineer from the National University of Singapore, a globally elite institution, with those of a Bachelor of History from University of Wisconsin-Parkside, a fine open-access college that makes a real effort to assist students from less-prosperous backgrounds. This part of the university equation has not filtered down to the consciousness of the general public, where the belief that a college or university degree—any degree—offers a major career boost remains illogically strong.

Some of the enthusiasm for college and university rests with the erosion of other opportunities. Imagine being a high school graduate in Flint, Michigan, or Oshawa, Ontario, in 1955. Automotive manufacturers had a huge hunger for hard-working young men—although not many women—at that time. A young man in Grade 10 or 11 faced a choice: accept a high-wage factory job with good union-inspired benefits or invest four years in a degree. Many opted for the former and, until the 1990s, could be confident that they had made the right economic decision. Leap forward fifty years. Similar high school students in these now post-industrial cities can see the employment devastation and industrial wasteland around them. Few employers are offering high-wage, secure employment to high school graduates. The local industrial option has faded dramatically in appeal in contrast to the promise that a degree appears to offer. With the division of employment into low-wage service work and diminished industrial work on the one hand, and well-paid employment for professionals and the technologically skilled on the other, the appeal of a university education is now evident.

Attitudes to work have also shifted, with strong manifestations of this change in the developing world. While romantics love to idealize the lives of coal miners, factory workers, and farmers, the reality is these are hard, often dirty, and frequently dangerous jobs. For generations, people have sought easier lives, adopting new technologies that removed the more difficult elements of pre-industrial and industrial labour. The glorification of office work and the declining enthusiasm for outdoor and physical labour have convinced parents the world over to invest heavily in their children’s education.

The dreams of university do not play out equally. In the West, college or university education has become a rite of passage, something parents plan and save for throughout their children’s youth. In other nations, however, getting into a degree-granting institution is no real accomplishment; entrance standards have fallen to derisory levels at many public and some private institutions. In richer countries, getting into the “right” institution—Oxford rather than the University of Arts London, Stanford over Clark Atlanta University of Georgia, University of Toronto over Algoma University—is the real struggle. Many families spend tens of thousands of dollars in trying to game the admissions system in order to secure a coveted spot in an elite institution. But still young people go to universities, even those of low and dubious abilities, in ever-increasing numbers.

Nowhere is the mystique of the Dream Factory more firmly entrenched than in the developing world, even though the local institutions, even the elite ones, are markedly inferior to the best universities elsewhere. Families spend enormous sums on prestigious local preparatory schools, often English-language and typically internationally-branded, in the hope that this will help their sons and daughters win admission to Oxford or Stanford or MIT. They then hand over large amounts of money to agents, some of whom are of dubious quality, who help children prepare for international admissions processes. They are met by hundreds of college and university recruiters, desperate for the high-fee-paying international students they increasingly rely on to pay their institutions’ bills.

The international-student recruitment process has turned into a high-stakes dating game. The students—and their parents—have their eyes on the elite institutions and the preferred countries (the USA, UK, Australia, Canada, Germany and New Zealand, but China and Japan are increasingly attractive as well). There are family dreams and a great deal of money at stake—an international student will, over four years, pay more than US$200,000 in tuition at a top-ten American school, £40,000 to £140,000 in the UK, AUS$120,000 in Australia and as much as CDN$140,000 in Canada, depending on the program. But there is no lack of students. China sends over 275,000 students per year to the United States, representing over 30 percent of the international student total. India is in second place, at about 12 percent.

While rich families can afford the price of attending a Dream Factory—each year Harvard, Oxford, and the Sorbonne welcome dozens of the children from the world’s wealthiest families—middle-class and working-class families often mortgage the future of the extended family to make attendance possible. Recruiting agents, frequently paid by both the families and the recruiting institutions, try to align interests, abilities, and admission standards. The dependence on a single country can lead to questionable behaviour at the institutional level. One American school created a real stir when it was revealed that the university was adjusting entrance grades and taking extraordinary steps to ensure that the students stayed on campus, primarily to ensure a steady flow of international-student cash. One can only imagine the educational and financial calculus of international families as they balance savings, a child’s academic record, the admission standards of thousands of overseas institutions, the educational and career interests of the student, and the family’s strategy for migration and/or employment.

But as parents and young people began vigorously pursuing a limited number of places at the very best universities, other institutions saw an opportunity, expanding to meet a seemingly inexhaustible demand. Aggressive as well as prestigious institutions, particularly from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, opened campuses overseas. New York University brought its high-quality, high-cost liberal-arts education to Dubai and Singapore. Monash opened campuses in Malaysia and South Africa. James Cook University, a rising but little-known institution in Queensland that focuses on tropical areas, has campuses in Cairns, Townsville, and Brisbane, and overseas facilities in Singapore. George Mason University in Virginia has a campus in Songdo, South Korea. Some of these have foundered, including the University of Waterloo’s effort in Dubai and some costly experiments by British universities in China.

Profiting from the Dream

But even with a few faltering steps, the trajectory remained the same: students from around the world were clamoring for higher education. Universities salivated at the possibilities, domestically because this justified rapid expansion, and internationally because the high tuition paid in most nations underpinned the increasingly precarious financial situation on campuses.

Governments loved the expansion as well. The arrival of thousands of international students, many of them well-heeled, did more than expand the university enrolments. The students spent money on everything from housing and food to cars and entertainment—and more than a little on alcohol—boosting the local and national economies in the process. Hosting international students became an industry in its own right. Australia declared international students to be worth AUS$16.3 billion in 2013–14.[18] Other countries, aided by bean-counting university organizations, spoke enthusiastically about the $7.7 billion Canadian sector,[19] the $22 billion brought into the United States,[20] and the £2.3 billion contributed to the United Kingdom’s economy every year.[21]

The situation seemed like a match made in heaven. Young people wanted to go to university. Their parents were willing to foot the bill to send them overseas. The receptor universities were happy to welcome them, with the elite institutions selecting some of the brightest (and wealthiest) students on the planet and the lower-ranked universities hoovering up thousands of full-fee-paying students, albeit often of lower academic standing. Governments bought in big time, welcoming the annual infusion of cash into the local economies. Few complained—and surprisingly little thought was given to the simple question of whether or not this massive expansion in university attendance was connected to the needs of the national and global economies.

Others saw commercial opportunities in the global preoccupation with the Dream Factories. A massive industry of agents grew up around the world, with specialists, some qualified and honest, others not, promising parents and students access to the best universities. No one really knows the balance between those with integrity and those who are simply eager for cash. Add to this the privately run housing units, immigration lawyers (it is not automatic that the students admitted to even a top university will get the appropriate visas in a timely fashion), travel agents, and the like who cluster around the international-student industry. Not surprisingly, fraudsters gathered. Recently Mark Zinny, an ex-Harvard teacher and “educational consultant,” was sentenced in Boston to five years in prison for scamming a Chinese family for $2 million in fees and bribes to get their sons into top prep schools and colleges. The Boston Globe commented that “the case calls attention to the dark side of a growing international admissions consulting industry, as more foreign families seek to send their students to elite US schools at any cost.”[22]

The private sector has also stepped in to compete with public institutions for fee-paying students. The for-profit companies engage at many levels in the educational process. Private secondary schools offer students from non-Western countries high-quality, internationally recognized diplomas that give them a leg up on students graduating from domestic high schools. There is a large global network of English-language training centres, most operating on a for-profit basis and many targeted at helping would-be international students pass their Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) or other language competency examination. (There is a much smaller industry associated with helping students improve their skills in German, Spanish, French, and Chinese.) China alone claims more than three hundred million people are studying English; Japan has millions taking English lessons. Private and public institutions in Western countries also offer pre-university English-language programs, primarily focused on university entrance, another lucrative sideline for the global education industry.

The involvement of for-profit institutions goes much further than these preparatory stages, however. Private for-profit colleges, often brokering programs from established and accredited institutions, recruit, teach, and graduate their own students, or aid them in transferring mid-program into the more prestigious non-profit institutions. For-profit institutions have proliferated around the world, ranging from the University of Phoenix, Laureate Education, Corinthian Colleges, and University Canada West to hundreds of private institutions in countries such as China, Pakistan, Nigeria, and others. Indeed, the Indian private universities market is growing so rapidly and with so little oversight that it is effectively out of control, as well as of doubtful quality.

But there is money—often big money—to be made in education. And not all of the university aspirants can get into Princeton, UCLA, Cambridge, or the University of British Columbia. When students can’t get into a high-ranking institution but still want a degree, they will find many others, both national and international, that are happy to oblige them for a price. With a university degree almost fully commoditized, and with high status attached to the top schools, many students who dream of getting into elite institutions end up going downmarket from the top one hundred, to the top one thousand, and eventually to a low-ranking institution that will accept any international applicant with enough money to pay its fees.

To capitalize on the global opportunities, universities have expanded their international recruiting offices, sent recruiters to high schools in countries where there is a high demand, and participated in massive university and college fairs that attract thousands of eager—even desperate—students and their parents. Recruiting for the Dream Factories has become an industry its own right, with associations, specialized training, conferences, professional associations, marketing divisions, trade magazines, and the other accoutrements of a multi-billion-dollar a year industry. At the most aggressive universities, students define their interests by answering a brief questionnaire. Thanks to digital technology, each student then receives a personalized newsletter from the recruiting office that highlights campus activities, services, and personnel connected to the applicant’s preferences. Consider the situation from the university’s perspective. An international student attending a top American university might pay more than $50,000 a year in tuition and another $20,000 in other expenses, for each of the four to six years it takes successful students to complete a degree. A smart university would happily pay $10,000 or more for an accepted and confirmed applicant, and is therefore quite willing to spend aggressively on recruiters, agents, participation in recruiting fairs, outreach to parents, promotional material, and personalized websites.

Is college worth it? A couple of years ago the New York Times posed this question, quoting William J. Bennett, secretary of education under President Reagan, and Jeffrey Selingo, an editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education, both of whom believe the American college system is self-destructing. Bennett, a conservative, believes too many people are going to college, and Selingo says those who do go aren’t getting their money’s worth for the debt they are accumulating. He cited the 645-foot-long river-rafting feature in the “leisure pool” at Texas Tech to support his claim that students are going into debt for needless frills. The Times takes a more benign view: “… most colleges are filled with hard-working students and teachers. At underfunded, overcrowded community colleges, which enroll more than a third of the almost 18 million American undergraduates, there aren’t many leisure pools.”[23]

New technologies have permitted another route to the Dream Factories, albeit one that has not yet reached its potential. The Internet and digital course delivery have accelerated the pace of university growth, permitting the more prestigious institutions to reach students around the world, new institutional aspirants to carve out a market niche, and socially-aware universities to provide high-quality education to non-wealthy students worldwide. A decade ago, as enthusiasm for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) surged, promoters forecast the demise of brick-and-mortar universities (they were wrong) and a rapid shift to Internet-based courses and universities. On many campuses, residential students do enrol in online courses instead of rousing themselves from bed to take a regular class (at Canada’s most innovative university, the University of Waterloo, more than 80 percent of online course registrations are from on-campus students). Online and distance learning has taken off dramatically in the developing world, where most of the largest universities are Internet-based, allowing students who otherwise could not have aspired to university attendance to start their studies.

Rarely has a single dream been embraced so widely, so enthusiastically, and so uncritically, as that of the modern university. There was enough evidence, particularly in the life and work histories of the baby boomers, to “prove” that a university degree would unlock opportunity, careers, and lifelong stability. The closest historical parallel to the race to universities in energy, commitment, and personal investment is perhaps the monumental global migration boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which sent millions from Europe to seize land and opportunities in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Argentina South Africa, Rhodesia, and a handful of other countries or colonies. Access to free or cheap land was the global ladder to opportunity in the industrial age. A century later, at the end of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, universities have become the object of global dreams and aspirations.

Don’t underestimate the anxiety that underscores the attempt to gain access to a university. In January 2012, one person died in a stampede set off when students panicked about admission to the College of Johannesburg in South Africa. With more than ten thousand students vying for one of eight hundred spots, the assembled youth rioted. The conflict started when the government, seeking to respond to the inequities created by an unjust and unequal high school system, lowered the passing grades for math from 50 percent to 30 percent, instantly making thousands of new aspirants eligible for admission. Sbahle Mbambo, a young woman, was one of those desperate for a place. “Everyone in this country wants to be educated,” she said. “They want to be independent, and to get proper jobs.”[24] South Africa’s anxieties peaked again in October 2015 when planned tuition hikes sent tens of thousands of angry students, mostly black, to the streets to protest what they saw as the growing inaccessibility of a university education.

The metrics of this application process are quite remarkable. In Japan, students pay an application fee of up to ¥10,000 (or more than US$1,000) for many universities. In India, middle-class parents with talented children work tirelessly to get them accepted into the career-making IITs, among the hardest universities in the world to get into. The tiger mothers immortalized by Amy Chua devote much of their energy to ensuring their little treasures have their choice of the very best schools. Getting a young adult into Oxford or Cambridge typically requires careful attention to the elementary and secondary school that the children attend, for few graduates from mediocre high schools make it into a top British university. In country after country, getting into an elite institution is seen as a sure road to career success and personal wealth.

No one, however, does it quite like the Americans. The USA has the world’s most remarkable and diverse university system. Everyone knows about the elite Ivy League universities, the superb public research institutions (Wisconsin-Madison and UC-San Diego are among the best universities anywhere), and even the truly special liberal-arts colleges, like Wellesley, Bates, Lewis and Clark, and Reed. Many fewer people have ever heard of the vast array of mid-ranked institutions, from Bowling Green to the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, that provide top-flight research to their regions and a decent education to their students. Almost no one has heard of the large number of aggressively mediocre institutions that admit all comers, graduate only a small percentage of their students, and give them little of value while they are there. While we forebear to name the universities in this last category, they are often in the news for their high attrition rates, poor student-satisfaction results, and financial crises.

It’s also worth noting that the image of cutthroat competition to get into a top institution is more hokum than reality. The top schools—Harvard, UC-Berkeley, Middlebury, and the like—are truly difficult to impress. Harvard accepts fewer than 7 percent of those who apply, and there is a careful self-selection process that winnows down the applicant pool to a small group of truly talented individuals. The mystique of Harvard—of which more later—is such that American parents are, like their Japanese counterparts, prepared to devote large sums of money and years of planning to line their children up for such an opportunity.

But beyond the top hundred universities in the country (or, in truth, the top fifty), the competition to get in is not terribly intense. Even the so-called “selective” institutions offer places to upwards of 75 percent of all applicants. An institution like Colorado College—an impressive place to be sure—makes offers to over 70 percent of applicants, meaning that it’s reaching a bit to call it “selective.” Similarly, Canada’s highly ranked and aggressively entrepreneurial University of Waterloo accepts close to 75 percent of the students who apply. Many of the institutions with quite flexible approaches to admission, particularly when trying to balance the entry class by gender and race, are truly fine institutions, offering an educational environment as good, if not better, than the allegedly elite institutions that garner the headlines. But, truth be told, a strong high school graduate, with an average of over 80 percent will get into almost all of the universities she or he applies for—outside the top hundred—and might even squeeze into the very top institutions, provided the goal is not a particularly high-demand program. Smart applicants realize that they can often apply for a low-demand program, sadly, in the arts at most institutions, and wrangle a transfer later into a high-demand offering, like business.

Despite this, American parents devote a remarkably large amount of time and money preparing their children for admission to the right school. They send them to after-school programs—called juku (cram) schools in Japan, but available in countries around the world, particularly through the now-ubiquitous Sylvan Learning Centres—to overcome the perceived and actual liabilities of most high schools. They pay for SAT (the Scholastic Aptitude Test) preparation classes, aiming to get their children into the 1,200+ score category that opens a lot of campus doors. These same students are counselled to volunteer, excel in sports, run for student council, help the needy, write a screenplay, sing on Broadway, or otherwise demonstrate to the admissions officers that they are real firebrands, worthy of entrance to a high-profile university. With many of the best schools requiring a formal letter of application, parents also pay for a coach to help draw up the all-important document, outlining the applicant’s stellar citizenship, legacy of overcoming personal crises, humanitarian zeal, and intellectual gifts. These same aggressive, overbearing, and highly protective parents then accompany their children on extensive campus tours, visiting top choices (and a couple of “safety schools,” institutions that are sure to admit them in case the top ones send rejection letters) and seeking to impress admissions officers.

The United States is not the only country that has developed an entire industry around preparing children for admission into elite universities, but it is the one that does it most openly, at the highest expense, and with the greatest public awareness of the topic. Parents have come to view the investment in admission coaches as akin to a form of career health care, evidence that they are loving and devoted to their kids. Focusing on the USA, however, overshadows the increasingly global nature of this student-focused enterprise. In the Middle East, wealthy families also spend very large sums to support their children at overseas universities. In China and Hong Kong, where the value of a top-flight technical (that is, engineering, math, science, accounting, or business) education is valued more than anywhere on earth perhaps, parents of all social classes invest heavily in the academic careers of hard-working youngsters. The growing African middle class, likewise, seeks out international opportunities for its children, despite the high costs and long periods away from the home country. So it goes in Brazil, where the intellectual allure of the former imperial power, Portugal, draws hundreds of students across the Atlantic each year—aided now by a multi-billion dollar scholarship program to send undergraduates and graduates overseas. In Brazil, as well, the academically elite public university system attracts a great deal of attention, with parents pushing their students to excel in high school so that they can avoid the much higher fees at the country’s private institutions.

Many countries—Canada, Scandinavia, Russia, Spain, Portugal, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand among others—take great pride in their egalitarian university systems, with the quality of teaching, research, and facilities varying relatively little across a wide range of institutions. In these countries, parents can rest much easier and can feel comfortable about sending their children to the local publicly funded university, although this is starting to change as national and international ranking systems become all the rage in the pursuit of advancement for young adults.

Parents are important simply because they play two crucial roles in determining the shape of the global university system. They influence the choice of institution and they finance (or refuse or are unable to finance) the undergraduate education for many students. Their preoccupation with the world of work leads them to press for admission to a prestigious university and enrolment in a market-related field. Parents from China and those of Chinese ancestry of place exceptional pressure on their children to take a science, business, or technical program. European families are far more comfortable with arts-based education. A Chinese family, facing massive and even multi-generational investment in a single child, cheer the decision to go to CalTech or to study computer science at the University of Hong Kong. It is often considered an extended family failure if a son or daughter ends up at Brandon University or Newcastle in the UK. A Western family is likely to be happy with admission into any field at Yale, Swarthmore, or Auckland; if the young adult is only able to get into the University of Pennsylvania at Bradford or Charles Darwin University (Australia), it is much preferred that they take a practical field, such as math or education. University is a family matter, starting with the enforcement of parental expectations from a very young age, establishment of an education trajectory, selection of a university, and financing.

There is a gripping illustration—tragic in so many ways—of how this works out in America, and this story can be replicated in dozens of countries around the world. Waiting for Superman is a documentary film indictment of public education in the United States. In the process of critiquing the existing school system, director Davis Guggenheim follows dozens of children entered into a lottery to get into a prestigious and high-quality charter school. The calculus from here is devastatingly simple. Get accepted and the student is on track to university admission and the prospect of a good life. Get turned down and the student is sentenced to a lifetime of mediocrity and poverty, based on attendance at a substandard public school. The faces of the parents—and by extension, their children—as the lottery names are called, passing over one after the other, speak volumes about the crisis of expectations. With so many North American families assuming that their children have to go to university in order to succeed, the failure to get into a good feeder school at the age of eight or nine years is viewed as a family catastrophe.

As for the agents who help with getting them into a good college, a distressing number of them are apparently willing to fabricate or alter high school transcripts and other documents in order to get past admissions officers and visa officials. Often, the universities pay the agents as well, creating impressive cash flows and potential conflicts of interest all around. The result can be spectacular abuse, such as the 2012 scandal that hit Dickinson State University in North Dakota, where it was discovered that dozens of students had been let in inappropriately and were then shepherded through the degree process in questionable ways. Or worse, the 2011 scandal involving Tri-Valley University of California, accused of collecting fees from foreign students but not requiring them to attend class so that they could work throughout the country on student visas.[25]

While most Western countries have fairly straightforward systems of admission—those with the highest grades get in—the United States has a bewildering array of institutional choices and admission procedures. Here, as in China, admission agents have proven extremely popular. Agents advise about where to volunteer, how to broaden the resumé, and how to shape the all-crucial letter of application to suit institutional expectations. There are shady dealings here as well. Some high school seniors have been directed to faux humanitarian projects, allowing the students to stay in nice accommodations while getting their pictures taken with orphans and AIDS sufferers. Amazingly, and perhaps providing proof of their poor fit at a top institution, the applicants and their parents seem to believe that the universities don’t know about these scams. Outsourcing both the selection process—agents are supposed to find the best school that will accept the student—and the work needed to get into that school undercuts one of the core purposes of the admission process. Universities want to know (or they should want to know) that the student is really interested in attending their institution; not that their parents can afford to hire an agent to fill in the forms, edit the letter of application, and charm the admissions officers.

In an age of egregiously spoiled children—one outcome of small family size and two-career families—it’s hardly surprising that parents devote a great deal of effort to the admissions process. But there are deeper issues at play here. While the reality is less impressive than the myth, most wealthy parents buy into some variant of the double-dipper myth of university attendance. The first, and widely shared, element is that a university degree creates job opportunities and therefore a steady adult income, and even a rewarding career, although that is becoming secondary. Second, there is the belief that attendance at the “right” university will bring prestigious opportunities, through personal connections (maybe your son will marry the daughter of a billionaire or your daughter’s roommate will become a senior executive at Procter & Gamble) and the glamour of the degree. That 40 percent of the graduating class from Yale University found work in the financial industry—despite the moral bankruptcy of the sector in the last decade—is a clarion call to parents: “Get your kids into Yale and they will be rich!”

Other countries offer variations on the same theme. Attendance at a top Japanese school is often a precondition for a great job in the civil service, where power rests in Japan. In India, graduating from an IIT produces a badge of honour that the individual and the extended family carry for life. Every country has its institutional hierarchy, which in the minds of parents relates far more to career opportunities and income forecasts than the universities would like to believe; their commitment is to the ideal of high education, world-class research, and a stimulating intellectual environment. The Times Higher Education Supplement produces a widely distributed annual ranking of the top four hundred universities in the world. Grabbing a spot near the top—“the 400” represents about half of one percent of the world’s universities—pushes an institution to the forefront of parents’ minds. The rankings, won by academic success and determined by peer reviews, have their primary value in recruiting students (and donors) to the institution. In much the same way, the U.S. News & World Report’s rankings industry shapes and distorts institutional expenditures and planning, all with a view to making the universities more attractive to students and their parents.

The Rationale for Investing in Higher Education

Accept, if you will, that there are parents who truly wish their students to have a challenging intellectual experience, to study at the feet of the masters, and to graduate from universities with a well-developed world view and a broad understanding of the human condition and/or the natural world. Recognize that these parents are in the minority. Parents are prepared to invest very heavily—up to $60,000 a year for a top American private university and $20,000 a year for a high-ranked public institution, when living costs are factored in.

Why do they pay so much? Because they want their children to get a job and earn a high income. (Or, to be frank, if the family is truly wealthy and the teenagers will never have to work for a living, the goal is largely pride and bragging rights.) They have sipped the university Kool-Aid for decades and perhaps benefited from university attendance themselves, when participation rates were much lower and the job market much more favourable. Or sometimes they ante up because they can see no other alternative. We live in an age that prioritizes white-collar office work and that unwittingly deprecates blue collar or physical labour, even if such work produces higher and steadier incomes. Finally, parents are willing to pay up because they know that few children have the entrepreneurial spirit and drive to produce their own jobs and careers. So, in an age of rampant credentialism, when a university degree is a prerequisite for the most basic, entry-level jobs—rental-car clerk, telephone operator, and the like—when they are bombarded by promises about the knowledge economy, when government leaders speak about the high value attached to post-secondary education, and when everyone is encouraged to enrol in university, they do the obvious thing.

Politicians reinforce these parental obsessions when they speak in boosterish terms about the “knowledge economy” and the open-ended opportunities that lie before college and university graduates. As companies such as Microsoft, Cisco, Sun Computer Systems, DoCoMo, Samsung, Alibaba, Nokia, and thousands of others displaced the big industrial firms at the top of the corporate order, it seemed that new technologies and their applications would define the evolving global economy. The global expansion of university education, both domestically and in terms of the annual migration of millions of international students, has been tied to the assumption that the high-tech economy of the twenty-first century would easily absorb all of the graduates from the world’s universities. This is proving to be only partly true.

Diversity in Size, Diversity in Quality

Savour for a moment the diversity of these Dream Factories. Universities are to cities, regions, and countries what a degree is to the student: a promise of prosperity and opportunity. There are more than thirty thousand degree-granting universities operating around the world, not counting a growing and unknown number of private-sector, for-profit institutions. These universities range in size from tiny specialist religious universities in the United States, such as the City University in Kansas City, Missouri, which has twelve students, to massive online universities in the developing world. Indira Gandhi National Open University, based in Delhi, India, enrolls 3.5 million students. They vary just as widely in quality, with Harvard University, Oxford University, and the University of Tokyo emerging from the same academic tradition as the New England Institution of Art (rated as the worst college in the United States by Washington Monthly and ranked poorly in terms of student satisfaction). These thirty thousand institutions are all universities, in the legal and technical definition of the term, but they are as different from one another as soccer is from roller derby.

The transformation that has occurred in higher education during the last five or six decades has been almost universally viewed as a positive social change. Universities have evolved from what they once were—reclusive places of intellectual contemplation—into modern institutions. Yet some have also become degree mills that are destroying the reputation of university education around the world. Discovering that the transition is, in numerical terms, largely a function of the last sixty years and, in quality and impact, the last twenty years, should be reason to pause. In less than a century, universities have emerged from their impressive foundation in North America and Western Europe, beyond the toehold created in Asia and the European colonies, into global ubiquity.

Once elite, aloof, and unique, universities are now democratic, accessible, and commonplace. Every town and city of substantial size—and many unsubstantial places—expects to have a publicly funded university. Universities emerged, with little fanfare, as one of the central instruments of state educational, economic, and social planning and have become a major force for change around the globe.

Celebrated as a universal “good thing,” universities are reshaping pathways to careers and adulthood for hundreds of millions of young people. Their presence transforms communities and changes the way that employers recruit, train, and hire young people. More importantly, they have become repositories for the dreams of millions of young adults, their parents, their communities, and their nations. The world has embraced these institutions in a remarkable, uncritical, and highly enthusiastic way. Now the young, their families, and their countries are slowly discovering that these dreams are compromised, that the promise of personal and collective opportunity has been seriously exaggerated, and that the unchecked and ill-managed growth of the university system has developed without much reference to the job market or the global economy. But they sure are popular.