As universities are increasingly exposed to the rough justice of the market, their institutional life is distinguished more by the rate of change than by the observance of custom and tradition. Few examples illustrate this better than the rush, in recent years, to establish overseas programs and branch campuses. Since 9/11, the pace of offshoring has surged and is being pursued across the entire spectrum of institutions that populate the higher education landscape, from the ballooning for-profit sectors and online diploma mills to land grant universities to the most elite, ivied colleges. No single organization has attained the operational status of a global university, after the model of the global corporation, but it may only be a matter of time before we see the current infants of that species take their first, unaided steps.

The formidable projected growth in student enrollment internationally, combined with the expansion of technological capacity and the consolidation of English as a lingua franca have resulted in a bonanza-style environment for investors in offshore education. As with any other commodity good or service that is allowed to roam across borders, there has also been much hand-wringing about the potential lack of quality assurance. How will globalization affect the security and integrity of livelihoods that are closely tied to liberal educational ideals like meritocratic access, face-to-face learning, and the disinterested pursuit of knowledge? Will these ideals wither away entirely in the entrepreneurial race to compete for a global market share, or will they survive only in one corner of the market as the elite preserve of those who are able to pay top dollar for such hand-crafted attention?

No slouch when it comes to entrepreneurial conduct, NYU has eagerly sought recognition as a global player. In the course of the 1990s, it established itself as the national pacesetter in sending students abroad. Currently, 25% of its vast student body, many of whom refer to their alma mater as Global U, enrolls in one of its eight study abroad programs–in London, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Prague, Florence, Shanghai, and Accra–and the administration has mandated this number to rise to 50% by 2011, with new sites already planned in Latin America and Israel. Its faculty ritually bemoan the quality of offerings in many of the overseas “island” programs, or lament that students spend their time abroad in an edu-tourist bubble, cosseted from any authentic contact with a non-American culture or environment. Much less discussed is the financial reasoning behind these and other NYU offshore operations, or the overall logic behind the rapid expansion of the university’s existing global network in recent years. Some of this neglect is due to the lack of fiscal transparency at a private university, and to the eroded state of faculty governance over academic affairs. But to approach the topic adequately requires familiarity with the larger picture of how and why American, British, and Australian institutions, in particular, are going global.

In the larger world of higher education, the distinction between onshore and offshore education – like that between private and public, or non-profit and for-profit – has become very blurry indeed. The distinction matters even less when viewed from the perspective of how the export trade in educational services is defined. The WTO, for example, recognizes four categories under this heading. Mode I involves arms-length or cross border supply such as distance learning. Mode 2 is consumption abroad, which is primarily covered by international students studying overseas, enrolled at institutions in the U.S. for example. Mode 3 is commercial presence, basically foreign direct investment in the form of satellite branches of institutions, and Mode 4 is movement of natural persons such as academics teaching abroad. All the current and foreseeable growth is in Mode 1 and Mode 3, and much of this is assumed to be linked to a perceived decline in Mode 2 growth. Statisticians justify their own trade as well as the core principles of free trade by showing how these patterns of ebb and flow are interconnected. In response, and as a general fiscal principle, organizations will try to balance their budgets by pushing expansion in one area to compensate for shortfalls in another. This is how global firms have learned to operate, by assessing and equalizing the relative return on their investments in various parts of the world, both in the world of real revenue and in the more speculative realm of brand-building for the future. University accounting departments have begun to juggle their budgets in a similar way. A deep revenue stream from a facility in the Middle East will be viewed as a way to subsidize unprofitable humanities programs at home (as is the case at one Midwestern institution where I inquired) just as an onshore science center capable of capturing U.S. federal grant money may be incubated to help fund an Asian venture considered crucial to brand-building in the region.

If universities were to closely follow the corporate offshoring model, what would we expect to see next? In a labor-intensive industry (a characteristic that education shares with the garment industry: 75% of education costs go on teaching labor), the instructional budget is where your employer will seek to minimize costs first, usually by introducing distance learning or by hiring local, offshore instructors at large salary discounts. Expatriate employees, employed to set up an offshore facility and train locals, will be a fiscal liability to be offloaded at the first opportunity. If your satellite campus is located in the same industrial park as Fortune 500 firms, then it will almost certainly be invited to produce customized research for these companies, again at discount prices. It will only be a matter of time before an administrator decides it will be cost-effective to move some domestic research operations to the overseas branch to save money. And once the local instructors have proved themselves over there, they may be the ones asked to produce the syllabi, and, ultimately, even teach remote programs for onshore students in the U.S. Inevitably, in a university with global operations, administrators who have to make decisions about where to allocate its budgets will favor locations where the return on investment is relatively higher. Why build expensive additions at home when a foreign government or free trade zone authority is offering you free land and infrastructure? Why bother recruiting overseas students when they can be taught more profitably in their countries of origin? If a costly program can only be saved by outsourcing the teaching of it, then surely that is the decision that will be made. And so on.

But is this the way it has to be? For all the zealous efforts to steer higher education into the rapids of enterprise culture, it would not be hard to demonstrate that, with the exception of the burgeoning for-profit sector, most universities do not and cannot, for the most part, function fiscally like a traditional marketplace, and that the principles of collaboration and sharing that sustain teaching, learning, and research are inimical or irreducible, in the long run, to financialization after the model of the global corporation. Yet one could say much the same about the organizational culture of the knowledge industries. High tech firms depend increasingly on internationally available knowledge in specialized fields; they collaborate with each other on research that is either too expensive or too multi-sided to undertake individually; and they depend, through high turnover, on a pool of top engineers to circulate brainpower throughout the industry. So, too, the management of knowledge workers has diverged appreciably from the traditions of Taylorism, and is increasingly modeled after the work mentality of the modern academic, whose job is not bounded by the physical workplace or by a set period of hours clocked there. Modern knowledge workers no longer know when they are on or off the job, and their ideas (the stock-in-trade of their industrial livelihoods) come to them at any waking moment of their day, often in their most surveillance-free moments. From this perspective, talk about the “corporate university” is a lazy shorthand. The migration of our own academic customs and work mentalities onto corporate campuses and into knowledge industry workplaces is just as important a part of the story of the rise of knowledge capitalism as the importation of business rationality into the academy, but the traffic in the other direction is all too often neglected because of our own siege mentality.

In all likelihood, we are living through the formative stages of a mode of production marked by a quasi-convergence of the academy and the knowledge corporation. Neither is what it used to be; both are mutating into new species that share and trade many characteristics. These changes are part and parcel of the economic environment in which they function; where, on the one side, a public commons unobtrusively segues into a marketplace of ideas, and a career secured by stable professional norms morphs into a contract-driven livelihood hedged by entrepreneurial risks; and, on the other side, where the busy hustle for a lucrative patent or a copyright gets dressed up as a protection for creative workers; and the restless hunt for emerging markets masquerades as a quest to further international exchange or democratization.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 11:51 am and is filed under Knowledge economy, Political economy of higher education, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.