Acknowledgments ix
Introduct ion: What Is Global Higher Education--and Why Does It Matter? 1
Chapter One The Worldwide Race for Talent 14
Chapter Two: Branching Out 42
Chapter Three: Wanted: World-Class Universities 70
Chapter Four: College Rankings Go Global 100
Chapter Five: For-Profits on the Move 141
Chapter Six: Free Trade in Minds 167
Afterword 194
Notes 199
Index 221

How global competition for the brightest minds is changing higher education
In The Great Brain Race, former U.S. News & World Report education editor Ben Wildavsky presents the first popular account of how international competition for the brightest minds is transforming the world of higher education--and why this revolution should be welcomed, not feared. Every year, nearly three million international students study outside of their home countries, a 40 percent increase since 1999. Newly created or expanded universities in China, India, and Saudi Arabia are competing with the likes of Harvard and Oxford for faculty, students, and research preeminence. Satellite campuses of Western universities are springing up from Abu Dhabi and Singapore to South Africa. Wildavsky shows that as international universities strive to become world-class, the new global education marketplace is providing more opportunities to more people than ever before.
Drawing on extensive reporting in China, India, the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, Wildavsky chronicles the unprecedented international mobility of students and faculty, the rapid spread of branch campuses, the growth of for-profit universities, and the remarkable international expansion of college rankings. Some university and government officials see the rise of worldwide academic competition as a threat, going so far as to limit student mobility or thwart cross-border university expansion. But Wildavsky argues that this scholarly marketplace is creating a new global meritocracy, one in which the spread of knowledge benefits everyone--both educationally and economically. In a new preface, Wildavsky discusses some of the notable developments in global higher education since the book was first published.

Ben Wildavsky is a visiting fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is the award-winning author of The Career Arts: Making the Most of College, Credentials, and Connections (Princeton) and the coeditor of Reinventing Higher Education and Measuring Success. The host and coproducer of the Higher Ed Spotlight podcast, he has written for leading publications such as the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Policy and has lectured widely in the United States and abroad.