by Janadas Devan, The Straits Time, Singapore, December 2004
WHEN Jawaharlal Nehru was arrested by the British in 1942, he traipsed off to prison clutching, among other things, Plato’s Republic and Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (in the original French, of course). This Indian freedom fighter was nothing if not inward with high European culture.
He was not the only one. Anti-colonial movements throughout the British Empire were led by figures like him. Products of English universities, they learnt the Master’s language in order to overcome the Master.
Thomas Macaulay’s 1835 Minute On Education, which set out to create ‘a class of persons Indian in blood and colour but English in taste, opinion, morals and in intellect’, ended up unwittingly undermining the very Empire that it meant to buttress.
Education, especially at the tertiary level, has acquired different purposes in the post-colonial era. Many of the best universities in former British colonies still teach in English, but they do so for pragmatic reasons, not so as to create replicas of Macaulay.
Many of the best and brightest in those former colonies continue to go to Oxbridge, but so as to be better able to compete with the Master on the global stage, not to overcome him at home.
And British universities continue to welcome them, not because they believe they are still in the civilising business, but because a) the foreigners pay good money, b) the universities need them to keep up their own research capabilities, and c) Britain would not mind if the best among them remained behind. The Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, is now an Indian – the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen.
But it was the United States that pioneered this new era in tertiary education. Something of the Macaulay civilising mission remained in America’s welcome of foreign students – spreading US influence and values, seeding the world with friends, and so on – but that was not the motivating impulse.
The motivating impulse was nothing less than to trawl for talent. US universities, as Professor Linda Lim, a Singaporean teaching at the University of Michigan, observed, sought foreign students not only as a source of funding, but also because they needed them as researchers and as teaching assistants for undergraduate teaching, and because they were a source of innovation for US industry.
This dependence on foreign students is especially marked in the sciences and engineering because Americans perform poorly in these subjects. US universities now award only about 4,000 bachelor degrees in physics, and as a result, about half of all US physics graduate students today are foreign, compared to a fifth in 1960.
The situation is no different in engineering, where more than half of the graduate students have been foreign for more than a decade. Many stay on to work in the US. As a result, in some aerospace companies, the unofficial language is now Mandarin, and in some software companies, it is English, with an Indian accent.
Given this degree of dependence on ‘foreign talent’, it is not surprising that US universities are protesting against the recent steep fall in their foreign applications. According to the New York Times, the number of Indians and Chinese taking the Graduate Record Exam dropped by half in July, while foreign applications to US graduate schools fell by 28 per cent this year.
One reason is the stiff, post-Sept 11 background checks imposed on all applicants for US visas, especially those from Muslim countries.
‘Last year, I was told that an Indonesian from the country’s central bank had been accepted to Michigan for an MA in economics and wanted to take my class,’ Prof Lim recalled. ‘But he did not get his visa, so he went off to Birmingham in Britain, instead.’
The US government is reportedly trying to expedite educational visa procedures, recognising the damage they are doing to US interests, but it will take time for the results to show. But will that be enough to reverse the decline in foreign applications? Are the push factors the only reason why a foreigner would go to the UK instead of the US?
US research universities, because of their excellence, will probably dominate tertiary education for a long time to come. But in addition to the push factors, there are also the pull factors: Other universities – notably, those from Britain, Australia, Germany and even Singapore – have also got into the business of trawling for foreign talent.
Singapore, for instance, conducts road shows abroad to attract foreign students to its universities, and offers scholarships to them.
Nanyang Technological University’s Deputy President and Dean of Graduate Studies, Professor Cheong Hee Kiat, told The Straits Times that NTU witnessed a surge in interest from foreign graduate students, particularly after Sept 11, ‘resulting in an increase in our graduate research student enrolment of about 50 per cent over a two-three-year period. This has allowed us to raise our intake quality significantly,’ with especially able students from China and India, and elsewhere in the region.
Education has become a global industry, and universities must compete for students in what has in effect become a common market. Talent itself has become as mobile as capital and the worldwide competition for graduate students is one example of this mobility. More nations recognise that they need to be players in the education field if they wish to attract and retain talent.
Somewhat like the Jesuits, who believed they could form a person for life if they got them young enough, nations have decided they have a better chance of retaining globally-mobile talent if they provide them with an education as well. The US was the first on this trail, finding ways to leverage on global talent to create innovative industries, and others are now following.
The globalisation of education is here to stay, and in ways Macaulay could hardly have imagined. The winners will be societies that are willing to accept, unlike Macaulay, ‘them’ as ‘us’.
Singaporeans would do well to remain wise in this matter.
The Straits Times
The New York Times article refered to here can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/21/national/21global.html?oref=login