At present, these are primarily Great Britain, as well as countries of the Asia-Pacific region: Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand. Particularly noteworthy is China, which at one time set as a national priority the task of turning 100 of its universities into first-class research centers: it has now begun to call on its citizens studying in the United States to return home and apply in practice the knowledge gained abroad.
The European Union also took a course toward competing with the United States in training foreign students. Here, students from foreign countries are offered a European study program, but instruction is conducted in English, and upon completion of the course they receive American-style diplomas. "And this is only the beginning," believes David Payne, executive director of the Service for Verification of Knowledge of Foreign Candidates for Study at American Universities. "Other countries have only just entered the struggle for the market of teaching foreigners, and the main battles are still ahead."
There is something to fight for: the U.S. education system earns about $13 billion a year from teaching foreign students. Thus, the first signs of a possible loss by the States of their leading positions in this sphere could not go unnoticed: according to data at the end of last year, the influx of foreign students into U.S. higher education fell by as much as 28%, while in England and Germany, for example, it began to grow.
According to a number of experts, this is partly due to difficulties in obtaining American visas that arose after September 11, 2001. The red tape of American officials affected students from all continents, gradually tilting their preferences toward European universities. According to Tim O'Brien, director of international development at the British university Nottingham Trent University, "in the English-speaking world, international education is one of the branches of big business in which the United States previously dominated." Today, new countries have entered the competition for "educational dollars" – Australia, Great Britain, Ireland, New Zealand and Canada. In O'Brien's opinion, they managed to take advantage of the difficulties foreigners face when entering the United States, actively promoting the idea that "American education is simply not worth standing for days in line for a visa outside American consulates. It's easier to just go study in England," O'Brien emphasizes.
Of course, American universities remain leading educational brands. Thus, according to a rating prepared by Shanghai's Jiao Tong University, based on the number of Nobel Prize laureates and academic publications per professor, 17 of the 20 best universities in the world, and 170 of the 500, are American. Nevertheless, already at the end of 2002 the first signs appeared of an incipient outflow of foreign students from U.S. universities. Thus, according to data for 2002, a total of 586 thousand foreign students studied in the United States; Great Britain was in second place in the world, where 270 thousand foreigners studied, and Germany took third place with 227 thousand students.
In 2004, against the backdrop of a decline in the number of students studying in the United States, the number of those who came to study in Great Britain increased by 15%, and to Germany by 10%.
Today the total number of students who go abroad to study each year is about 2 million, the majority of whom are traditionally supplied by India, South Korea and China. This trend will continue, however, according to experts at the forum of the World Organization for International Economic Development and Cooperation, due to economic growth in Asia, accompanied by the growth of the local middle class, by 2025 the number of "exported students" will sharply increase. And, according to Stefan Vincent-Lancrin, an analyst at the organization's headquarters in Paris and author of a special study on this topic, most countries, including the United States, have already begun competing to turn them into potential bearers of their traditional values.
At the same time, Vincent-Lancrin notes that in the 1990s new approaches to teaching foreigners appeared in the world. Countries with aging populations, such as Canada or Germany, began to resort to tactics of luring highly qualified personnel from abroad. They recruit talented students into the most promising areas of education and, in addition, encourage them in every way to stay in the country after receiving a higher education diploma. In Germany, for this purpose, they even practice the distribution of scholarships and free education for foreigners.
Moreover, according to Stefan Vincent-Lancren, Australia and New Zealand have begun to pursue a policy of "income growth." This means that higher education here has come to be treated as a separate type of industry, within which it is necessary to provide students with a full range of educational services. Progress along this path has allowed Australia and New Zealand to take a worthy place in the international market of educational services, offering quality education at low prices compared to American ones.
Countries such as China, India and Singapore also contribute to changing the global market of educational services. Here, the education of their students abroad is viewed only as a way to provide their own universities with highly qualified national personnel. And they are developing extremely quickly, emphasizes Vincent-Lancrin.
According to Rabindranath Panda, education adviser to the Indian Consulate General in New York, large private investments in Indian higher education in recent years have significantly increased the attractiveness of education at home for Indian students. And those of them who nevertheless go abroad to study are looking for universities not only in the United States or Great Britain, but are paying increasing attention to other countries. As a result, according to the latest data, the number of Indians studying in the United States has decreased by 28%.
The situation of Chinese people studying in the United States has undergone even greater changes. According to local forecasts, in 2005 about 16 million Chinese will want to improve their qualifications (by comparison, in 2000 there were 11 million), and this number will continue to increase. Even if we assume that only a small part of applicants will go abroad for an academic degree, hundreds of foreign universities will be happy to compete for them, and it is not at all certain that students will prefer the United States.
According to experts, the difficulties that Chinese people face today in obtaining American visas are much greater than for students from any other part of the world (except perhaps the Middle East). One of the reasons for this is that many Chinese people strive to study in the United States subjects related to the so-called 'dual-use technologies'.
In August 2004, the University of Michigan was visited by a delegation from Singapore. According to the university's president, Mary Sue Coleman, as soon as they began the meeting with her, the guests connected their computers and literally bombarded her with questions about how the educational process is structured at the university, about the main principles of fundraising, about the experience of administrative management, and about research. They wanted to know everything: how the University of Michigan acquired its fame and how it is managed today.
"Soon they will achieve positive results, and there is no doubt that a first-class university will be created in Singapore," Coleman believes. "But the same is happening in other countries. So we will face tough competition, and it will be better if we are ready for it."
Translation by Marina LEMUTKINA.