As published in The Boston Globe, March 24, 2006
Higher Education is Big Business
by Evan S. Dobelle
What if you had a product the whole world wanted? One that hundreds of thousands of young people from Beijing to Bombay to Buenos Aires would pay top dollar to have? A clean product whose manufacture and sale would bring jobs, money, and opportunity not just to you, but to your neighbors and your entire community?
Would you keep it in your sock drawer?
That is precisely what New England is doing with its colleges and universities. Students throughout the world want the quality of an American degree and the cachet of having gone to college in New England, and many of them have the financial resources to pay full tuition. But aside from schools with perceptibly elite brands, few of our region’s 270 higher education institutions have any name recognition among these young people. Fewer still have the strategy and resources in place to change that fact.
Australia, on the other hand, has its strategy already figured out and has made a concerted, nationwide push to market its colleges to foreign students. Aided by the tightening of student visas in the United States following September 11, Australian universities have more than doubled their foreign enrollments. Twenty percent of students in Australian universities are now full-paying foreign nationals. Higher education has become the fourth-largest industry there after coal, tourism and iron ore.
This is a big business, and we are losing the competition for primacy in the world market. Hong Kong, not Boston, is becoming the globe’s “college town” with over a thousand post-graduate foreign programs based there. Here at home demographic trends will make attracting students and preparing a vibrant workforce and citizenry major challenges. The number of graduating high school students in New England, after rising for the better part of a decade, will peak in 2008 and then begin a steady decline. Colleges, after years of expansion, are going to have to work harder to fill classroom seats and expensive new dormitory beds.
The solution to this shortfall has two major parts: first, reach out to local students from backgrounds that are underrepresented among undergraduates, such as working class families or fast-growing minority populations. We need to continue and expand our efforts to open college’s doors to all our citizens.
These underrepresented students, though, are likely to need financial help from their colleges to pay for their education. So simultaneously we need to recruit more foreign students, who are ineligible for most U.S. financial aid but who often have either the wherewithal to pay full tuition, or subsidies from their own country. With this added revenue, colleges will be in a better position to bolster need-based aid, not just merit aid, for students from around the corner, not just from around the world.
Beyond financial calculations, more foreign students mean more opportunities for American students to meet their counterparts from around the globe. Many of those foreign students--the future leaders of their countries--will form a bond with this region, leading to future business collaboration, enhanced cultural understanding, and formation of venture capital.
Lately more New England colleges, two year and four year, have begun paying attention to foreign recruitment. Many institutions are reaching out to students from developing countries, and some have long emphasized the value of international students on their campuses.
Most of our institutions, though, lag behind in the race. They offer quality programs of study and even have spaces available, but they lack a coherent means of marketing themselves overseas.
This is a challenge that waits a regional response. At the very least, the New England states should coordinate with colleges and universities on economic trade missions and other efforts to promote the region’s educational offerings. Collaboration would allow many of our smaller colleges and public universities to reach potential students at a much lower cost than working independently. The states would benefit from an influx of new spending from students and more jobs on campus for their residents; the economic impact has significant multipliers. Our 270 colleges and universities in New England employ 260,000 people with good benefits and have annual budgets totaling $20 billion.
Even better, though, would be international agreements between New England’s colleges and the higher education systems of countries such as Vietnam, Thailand, or Taiwan; Ireland, Italy, or Israel. We could use as a model the 50-year-old New England Higher Education Compact, an agreement that established the Regional Student Program to reduce tuition for students crossing state lines to go to college. Under the program, state colleges in the region have shared resources and saved tens of millions of dollars in tuition for our residents.
Such an agreement on the international stage would have the added benefit of allowing more of our students to study abroad affordably and to establish their own relationships with other cultures.
However we choose to deal with it, though, the crux of the matter remains. Higher education is globalizing like everything else. New England has the resources and talent to succeed in this new market, but to do so, we also need a plan from both the leaders of these institutions, as well as our elected public officials.
It’s good business. Higher education as an industry means jobs and revenue, and its research spawns hundreds of taxpaying start-up companies every year. Along with allied health and financial services, it complements high tech as economic engines for New England.
Evan S. Dobelle is president and CEO of NEBHE.
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