The News & TeleGraff

I'm catching up on some blogging this week—the articles that I've had sitting open on my computer for a long time this month as I've been traveling and have yet to comment upon.

This is one: The New York Times piece on education overseas and how foreign countries are working with U.S. educational institutions to set up outposts abroad:

The American system of higher education, long the envy of the world, is becoming an important export as more universities take their programs overseas.

In a kind of educational gold rush, American universities are competing to set up outposts in countries with limited higher education opportunities. American universities — not to mention Australian and British ones, which also offer instruction in English, the lingua franca of academia — are starting, or expanding, hundreds of programs and partnerships in booming markets like China, India and Singapore.

And many are now considering full-fledged foreign branch campuses, particularly in the oil-rich Middle East. Already, students in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar can attend an American university without the expense, culture shock or post-9/11 visa problems of traveling to America.

For years India's IITs have been the envy of the international education community but a half-century after India began investing in its IITs, today other countries wishing to compete on the global talent market find no need to go through the lengthy, expensive, and intensive development of strong domestic educational institutions. As Qatar’s emir set out to improve its education system in the mid-1990s he founded the Qatar Foundation to attract the world’s best universities to the city. Instead of going through the arduous process of building great educational institutions and world-class professors, it would simply recruit those that already exist.

The thriving 2,500-acre Education City on the outskirts of Doha is steadily adding the U.S.’s best minds. To launch its School for the Arts, the Qatar Foundation invited Virginia Commonwealth University to open a new Doha campus—the Qatar state would underwrite the cost, VCU would provide the courses. In 2002, Cornell University opened a new medical college, followed a year later by a branch of Texas A&M University and a policy institute run by the RAND Corporation. Carnegie Mellon University opened its campus in 2004, and Georgetown launched a branch of its prestigious School of Foreign Service in 2005. In 2006, the brand new Qatar Science and Technology Park opened and next will come a teaching hospital and a communications and journalism school. All of the schools are a model of liberal arts education and all the more impressive for fostering a cultural of liberal tolerance and diversity within a Muslim nation—and all underwritten by the natural gas-rich nation-state at little or no cost to the participating U.S. universities. Nearby the new $2 billion Doha International Airport, scheduled to open this year, will provide a gleaming welcome to the country. Qatar’s approach to education—cherry-picking the best the U.S. has to offer and then using it to educated class after class of students equal in academic strength to anything in the U.S.—is unprecedented and a model for public-private educational partnership in the globalized New Economy. Whereas it once would have taken decades to build a world-class university, the Qatar Foundation made it so from day one.

Qatar’s bet, of course, is that by churning out smart students, by coupling higher education and research institutions with a science and technology park, by providing a first-rate airport and top-of-the-line health care, it won’t have to wait for local companies to grow strong—instead the strongest, most competitive companies in the world will instead beat a path to Qatar’s door.

Why does this article matter to presidential politics? Just as one can’t doubt that India and China aren’t racing the U.S. to the bottom but are instead battling for first place, don’t doubt that Qatar plans to come after the U.S. economy, its jobs, and its best minds—it already is. If the next president fails to address education in a major way, waiting four more years or eight more years for a new advocate in the Oval Office will prove costly to the U.S. economy. We can't be content to let the same old systems exist in a world where any leader with a checkbook can overnight build a rival to the U.S. system.

As the Times piece notes, there are also major immigration questions wrapped up in this. If by making it difficult for foreign students to enter the U.S.—as we most certainly have since 9/11—we're encouraging them to stay home, what price will that have on the U.S. economy in future years? Imagine if Sergey Brin had decided to stay in Russia or Europe rather than come to Stanford, where he met Larry Page and co-founded Google. How will our country's economy in the next decades be different if the world's best and brightest choose Qatar, Ireland, India, or China instead of Harvard, Stanford, Georgetown, or Columbia?