In keeping with some of our recent posts about higher education and its future comes a piece by President Thomas in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Like it or not, education has become a principal economic player in a highly competitive, knowledge-based economy. This is evident in emerging economic giants like India and China, which are making large investments in higher education and threatening the historic global dominance of American colleges and universities. A powerful lesson on the subject was offered on a recent trip I took to China to learn how that country is tackling the demands of an ever-expanding technological world.
It was also a lesson in just what we have to lose if we act without caution.
I visited a city of several million people, where in a single year a four-square-mile University City has risen out of the farmlands (and outside the city) in the shadow of a new superhighway. Ten huge new university campuses, one after another, each housing tens of thousands of students, reach out as far as the eye can see: one campus for engineering; another, just steps away, for tourism; others for business, aeronautics, technology, agriculture, education, and so on....
As I compare this futuristic vision of efficiency and state planning with the jumbled patchwork of American higher education—from community colleges and technical schools to Ivy League and liberal-arts colleges, and land-grant state universities and research institutions—I cannot help but wonder if University City represents the efficient and affordable future of higher education, and we represent its quaint past.
And if that's true, I wonder about the cost to the Chinese—about the quality and value of the education those students will receive...
Read the whole piece here.
