The University Opportunity

Higher education is possibly our best chance to peace and prosperity

British historian Adam Tooze has animated contemporary debates around democracy and geopolitics by popularizing the term polycrisis. Alluding to climate change, the rise of disruptive new technologies, and a renewed appetite for war and authoritarianism in different parts of the planet, Tooze has been alerting about the grave threats that these simultaneous forces pose to the fundamental human capacities to both observe and participate in the world. As he argues, the rapid pace and concomitant nature of transformations in computing power, communications and the environment have altogether undermined the conditions for both individual and collective understanding of reality, as well as people’s ability to constructively participate in civic life and democratic societies.

Amidst this despairing scenario, higher education may have a critical role to play. Universities, their populations and their vast global and local networks are uniquely positioned to promote and cultivate powerful forms of cross-cultural understanding. Moreover, inter-disciplinarity, and inter-generational teaching, learning and researching are key to discovering, imagining and experimenting with innovative – and much needed – forms of human existence and co-existence. Although higher education itself may not be the final answer to the present polycrisis, investing in knowledge and human intelligence is possibly the safest bet we can make at a moment of generalized misinformation, misunderstanding and uncertainty. 

The world today has more universities, more college educated individuals and more people enrolled in post-secondary education than ever before. An exclusivity of small cultured elites during most of human history, higher education is now within reach to an unprecedentedly wide spectrum of individuals and societies. The field underwent profound transformations in the last four decades – in the rich world but especially in developing nations. Fueled by the insatiable demand for professional and tertiary degrees and by the rise of online learning, higher education now comprises an industry that moves nearly 1 trillion dollars every year, worldwide.

This late expansion may have had its origins in post-war Europe and the United States, where army veterans and baby boomers benefited from new governmental incentives to higher learning and higher earning. But it was not until the late 1980s, in the dawn of a new globalization era, that college education became the universal currency for better livelihoods in places as distant and as diverse as Deng Xiaoping’s China, post-Apartheid South Africa or post-soviet Ukraine. From north to south, east to west, youngsters and families from evermore diverse walks of life continue to see in higher education the undisputable passport to more prosperous lives.

In domestic and foreign affairs, betting in higher education typically yields prolific outcomes. The Fulbright program, now in its ninth decade, has arguably done more to American diplomacy than any other single governmental initiative since the early days of the Cold War. Operating with a fraction of the cost of maintaining a US embassy in Asia or the Middle East, Fulbright has trained generations of cross-cultural experts that continue to supply American intelligence with an unmatched edge. Similarly, the Bologna Process and the Erasmus program have been indispensable to the realization of the European unification project. The dream of a unified Europe may seem distant today. But it would hardly be conceivable without the thousands of cross-border relationships formed since the 1980s between students and scholars from all disciplines, languages, identities and corners of the continent.

In East Asia, echoes of Japan’s 19th Century Meiji era inspired the 20th Century higher education revolutions in Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. The modern founding fathers of those now prosperous Pacific nations have always understood that liberal democracy was an alien concept to their Confucian traditions. So, to defend from the imperial ambitions of their neighbors, they anchored the renascence of their nations in principles such as shared understanding, pluralism, and human flourishing. Not liberal democracy, but higher education was their single best shot to sustained peace and development.

More recently, petro-monarchies in the Middle East have unveiled their own version of a higher education revolution, by spending lavishly in attracting to their shores world-class universities and top talent from all over the academic universe. Avid readers of Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington, the emirs of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE know very well that history is far from ending and that the world is not as simple as a caricatural clash of civilizations. Heirs of the Islamic Golden Age, the rich rulers of the Gulf know that the greatest threats to their history, traditions and wellbeing do not come from Hollywood movies, human rights accusations or from the endless wars in their vicinity. The real existential danger comes from ignorance, isolationism and tribalism – the kinds of things that brought down all great civilizations of the past and that are now corroding the five-century old Western hegemony. For the Gulf states, investing heavily in higher education is not merely an attempt to move their economies away from oil-addiction. It is a matter of survival in a world that has become addicted to over-simplifications, zero-sum dichotomies, easy-fix solutionism, and radical generalizations. To thrive in the 21st Century, the tribal chiefs of the Arab World are investing in complexity, cosmopolitanism, experimentation and knowledge exchange. 

Inclusion and exclusion

Higher education is also a formidable mechanism of social inclusion. Economists may say that there is no better antidote to poverty than economic growth and productivity gains. Policy pundits will say that investments in defense, infra-structure and social security are the real game changers. But when it comes to promoting social justice, it’s hard to beat the record of higher education.

From India to Brazil - and everywhere in between - affirmative action policies in post-secondary admissions, although limited in scope and scale, have proven to be remarkably effective in improving the living standards of historically marginalized groups. Women, first-natives, afro-descendants, outcasts, migrants and the vast majority of disenfranchised peoples of the world have no better chance of overcoming systemic injustice than getting an opportunity to access the coveted spaces of higher learning. The US Supreme Court seems to think otherwise. But the overwhelming scientific evidence from the enormous body of work on international higher education show that a single scholarship to an underprivileged student, at home or abroad, can not only change that individual’s life but it often lifts entire communities.

Higher education networks are uniquely powerful because they distribute much more than material resources. Those networks stimulate strong bonds between individuals by linking them through innovative ideas, skills and deeply transformative learning experiences. When cultivated properly, higher education provides individuals and communities with the information and the agency to constructively question the status quo; to observe reality more holistically and to participate in the world more meaningfully, peacefully and purposefully.

However, precisely because they are such magnificent instruments for social inclusion, institutions of higher education have also worked as vehicles for exclusion. Universities are at the epicenter of all colonial enterprises. Although not intrinsically exclusive, universities have historically served to reproduce status, retain cultural capital and widen the abyss between cultured elites and the unlettered.

It is important to stress: The electors who reinstated Donald Trump in the White House are not ignorant. They are predominantly men ignored by college education. Similarly, more than gender, age, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic class or any other demographic indicator, what unifies the electors of Marie Le Pen, Björn Höcke and Viktor Orbán is their vicious and unison opposition to liberal learning. Spartan elitism and exclusionary practices in higher education are damaging corrosives to democratic values – as university students in Bangladesh know very well. 

Democracy survived a stormy electoral year, and it may survive the polycrisis. But it will not survive the darkness of ignorance. Even Plato and Socrates seemed to agree on that. As recognized by the 2024 Nobel Laureates in Economics – who reaffirmed what sociologists of education have been writing about for decades – nations built on exclusionary institutions – universities included – may attain some form of short-lived prosperity. But they will ultimately struggle to achieve sustained progress, peace and democracy. 

Not a low-hanging fruit  

Betting in education requires patience and perseverance. Investments in higher education are, fundamentally, investments in multiple generations of people; in their capacity to learn, to cooperate widely and to access humanity’s infinite pool of culture and collective intelligence to innovate. Those investments take time to mature, and although certain and risk-free, their returns are often multifaceted, hard to measure with precision tools, and only broadly distributed.

Higher education does not follow the news cycle, the electoral cycle, or the market cycles. It is usually the first thing to be forgotten and the last thing to be remembered in the agendas of governments, newsrooms, corporations, and philanthropy board meetings. Investments in higher learning are long-lasting – proof of that are universities themselves, which feature amongst humanity’s longest living institutions. But in a world ever more obsessed with fast results, the field of international higher education has lately been captured by speculators willing to harvest the low-hanging fruits of knowledge, rather than cultivating the slow-growing forests of teaching, research and learning.

The unprecedented planetary expansion of higher education in the turn of the millennium is an impressive achievement, which surely deserves to be celebrated. UNESCO estimates that over 250 million people are enrolled in post-secondary degree programs worldwide, almost three times more than in 2000 and five times the number in 1980. But when we take a closer look at this revolution and its relations to the present polycrisis, we realize that the rising demand for tertiary education was met chiefly by quantity rather than quality. In most countries, with a few notable exceptions, state funding to science and higher learning has either plummeted or been erratic, which meant that the recent expansion of enrollment was subsidized by private debt and capitalized by private – often for-profit – educational enterprises.

First in the United States and later exported to academic systems in all continents, the neoliberal university model gradually became hegemonic. A model in which the student is a “client”, and the university is a fee-collecting “service provider”; in which competition for funding and prestige eclipse collaboration; in which the public value and social purposes of higher education are overshadowed by the private and utilitarian value of a university diploma.

The emergence of the neoliberal university model not only sparked an unprecedented expansion of the field but it also gave rise to an entirely new ecosystem of higher education practices and professionals. Trump University is perhaps the most caricatural case of a university staffed almost exclusively by non-academics. Curriculum was led by mentors, life coaches and proselytists who promised students a straight path to stellar careers in business – and as far away as possible from academia or civic duty. In China, the torchbearers of the neoliberal model were a tsunami of private tutors who profited from the anxieties of young students and their emerging middle-class families, all victims of an unbearably competitive higher education system.

Trump University and private tutors in China may be extreme examples, whose fate were met prematurely. But the pedagogy on which those radical experiments were based lives on. Around the world, in both virtual and physical classrooms of all sizes and disciplines, messianic teachers continue to promise their student-clients not enlightenment, but influence, prestige and a shortcut to success. 

Not accidentally, the ascendency of the neoliberal university model was accompanied by the proliferation of international university rankings. Paired with a profitable cartel of academic publishers, those rankings contributed to deepen the abyss between the rich centers and the poor peripheries of the global knowledge economy. Scientific output, measured by the quantity of papers published in “high-impact” pay-per-view journals, became the gold standard to institutions and professionals throughout the immensely diverse academic universe. Suddenly, every university in the world began to emulate Oxford, every teacher wished to lecture at Princeton, every scientist aimed to research at MIT and every student dreamed of being admitted into Stanford. By incentivizing an impossible and counterproductive competition between different disciplines, universities and knowledge traditions, the overly simplified language of rankings and peer-review elitism inevitably emboldened the commodification of science and learning.  

Arguably, this process also led to the progressive precarization of academic careers, to the submission of the arts and humanities to more “employable” STEM degrees, and to the fossilization of scholars into feudal departments and niche professional associations. If, on the one hand, universities became more accessible to more people than ever, on the other, they have also grown more disconnected from real-world problems and from the everyday grievances of non-academic communities. Understandably, universities around the world – particularly in the global north – have become fertile grounds for cancel culture, and targets of renewed attacks to academic freedom.   

Nonetheless, defunding, deregulation, rankings and the greed of opportunistic tutors and publishers are not the only things to blame. The neoliberal university model would not have been as prolific if it wasn’t for the deepening entanglement between higher education and philanthropy.

The marriage between philanthropic giving and higher learning is not intrinsically bad, and it is certainly not new. Since the medieval universities of the Islamic world and the European Renaissance, rich benefactors have always sought to perpetuate their legacy by funding human ingenuity – and ingenious people have always relied on rich mecenas to sponsor their daring ideas and enlightening endeavors. Yet this inter-dependence between universities and their generous patrons has reached new heights in recent decades.

In the United States – still the undisputable Mecca of the higher education universe – around 60 billion dollars are donated every year to colleges and universities, and private donations to higher education are one of the most popular mechanisms of tax amortization amongst wealthy Americans. Rich donors in Asia, Europe and the Middle East are gradually catching up. A plethora of new educational foundations and non-governmental scholarship programs now populate the international higher education space, and virtually every rich university in the developed world has taken action to professionalize their development offices and boost their fund-raising capabilities.

For private donors, big and small, giving to universities has become an easy way – a low-hanging fruit – to avoid taxes and have their names perpetually linked with the noble cause of education. For rich universities – which are ran almost indistinguishably from large corporations these days – private donations have become a convenient way to fund business-as-usual.

But the limits of this virtuous cycle are evident. While philanthropic fortunes sponsor state-of-the-art libraries and programs in New and old England, this money rarely trickles down to the vast geographies cut off from top donor circuits and rich alumni networks. In particular, scholars, students and innovative educational enterprises outside the Anglophone world remain mostly invisible to the modern-day Medici from Boston to London, or Seattle to Sidney.

Re-igniting Higher Education

Global higher education is in need of an epochal re-boost. The prevailing neoliberal university model has expanded higher learning to far-reaching horizons over the last four decades. But the low-hanging fruits of knowledge have been overharvested, and the model is now showing clear signs of exhaustion. To revert this scenario, we should look at the present polycrisis as a source of opportunity rather than desperation.  

1. Climate Change – To begin, international higher education can be a powerful ally in the planetary fight against climate change. Almost everyone agrees that investing in education and science is essential to developing the knowledges, broad coalitions and technologies that will hopefully save humanity from extinction. Nonetheless, the blind spot of this strawman argument, which most people tend to forget, is that universities are indispensable for the so-called green transition.

Teaching, learning and researching are the quintessential green jobs. People in university classrooms and research teams are not merely working towards the advancement of science and technology. They are fundamentally investing in themselves, by honing all types of social, technical, civic and intellectual skills. By bettering themselves through knowledge, active learners not only push science to progress, but they also create enormous economic value in the process – as residents of any vibrant university town know well. Individuals and communities engaged in higher learning contribute not only to the linear growth of human resources but, most importantly, to the exponential growth of human capital. They diversify and innovate value-chains. They form creative and innovative bonds, and they add tremendous efficiency to all stages of production, circulation and consumption.

It is true that the university business is not carbon-free. Fossils and environmentally wasteful habits still fuel much of the old ways in which things continue to be done in higher education spaces. From powering and maintaining expensive infra-structure to flying insatiably mobile scholars around the globe, the international education economy has undeniably played a part in warming the planet. That said, who better than global coalitions of learners to lead the way for transformative sustainability?

When it comes to climate action, governments, corporations, international donors, and universities themselves must break away from the misconception that higher education is simply a safe box of climate solutions. Universities are not simply transactional institutions, where you put a lot of money on one side and collect sustainable technologies from the other. Instead, universities should be seen as hospitals or nurseries – places where essential workers are trying to figure out how to care for themselves and the planet in the new age of adaptation.

University classrooms and scientific research initiatives around the world have an enormous – and still largely underutilized – capacity to absorb and repurpose thousands of adult human brains that are now being wasted in unaffordable wars, precarious jobs and dead-end lifestyles on the edges of the Anthropocene. The losers of globalization – in the new and old rustbelts of the global north and south – have lost patience with messy democracies and brutal autocracies alike. Both have deprived them from their old dirty jobs and are failing to create enough new, good, clean occupations. Understandably, many of those excluded are now also blaming science, produced by higher education systems that neither include them nor offer them any tangible relief.   

Higher education should not be seen exclusively as a “path” to a good (and green) job. Especially nowadays, when such path is looking more and more bleak to millions of university graduates who, every year, enter the workforce full of debt and doubt. When President Franklyn Delano Roosevelt introduced the G.I. Bill in 1944, most analysts framed it as an education policy. In reality, the bill was one of the most effective cornerstones of the New Deal. Its main objective was never to retrain retired soldiers for careers in academia, but to avoid a catastrophic demobilization of army veterans after World War II. FDR understood that higher education should not be just a path to good jobs, but the key to unlocking new opportunities in the completely transformed post-War economy. 

2. Technology – This brings us to the second opportunity in the polycrisis: technology. Educators and technologists have a long and weary relationship. From the invention of the printing press to the proliferation of Chat GPT, teachers and tech enthusiasts have fought an endless tug of war over the virtues and dangers of ever evolving education technologies. Yet the most profound transformation in international higher education in the 21st Century was not initiated by educators or technologists. It was sparked by a highly contagious virus.

Few other spheres of human activity have been as radically disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic as higher education. University revenues plummeted. College campuses were deserted. Graduation ceremonies were cancelled. Academic conferences, fraternity parties and everything in between were moved online. However, differently than what happened in infant, primary and secondary levels of schooling, higher learning thrived.

Under immense stress, university professors and students seized the opportunity to experiment with innovative pedagogies, and updated curricular practices that had been stopped in time since the Industrial Era. Cross-discipline and cross-border scientific collaborations, fossilized by decades of unnecessary competition, were once again unleashed. Connected via Zoom and working together to develop and deliver vaccines in record-speed, the global scientific community re-discovered a sense of purpose and belonging that it had long lost. Hybrid education, an extravagance of progressive colleges before 2020, became the norm in the post-pandemic university world.

The momentum generated by the pandemic should not be wasted. The accelerated and widespread adoption of information technology by university communities across the world should trigger a new wave of global higher education expansion. Today, more than ever, investing in post-secondary learning does not require building or maintaining expensive infra-structure. What universities in Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, South and Central Asia need the most is not particle accelerators, quantum computer prototypes or rocket launchpads. First and foremost, they need cheap, reliable, and broadband internet connection.

International developers like the World Bank spent billions of dollars over the last half century helping to build tertiary education capacity in the post-colonial world. But those agencies had to do that mostly through conditional loans to unstable central banks, unequipped ministries of education and other unreliable intermediaries in the global south. Now, by channeling future investments to bridging the digital divide, international donors – corporate and philanthropic, included – have the opportunity to bypass suspicious brokers and give money to those who actually know what to do with it – namely: teachers, students and researchers themselves.

3. Artificial Intelligence – Of course, Starlink, iPads and MOOCs will not be enough to power the next revolution in higher education. Technology can play a much more pivotal role by pushing science to become more inclusive – or at least, less exclusive.

The rise of artificial intelligence presents a historic opportunity to debunk, once and for all, the notion that “good science” can only be made in English (the new Latin), by highly trained professionals in the Oxbridge axis or – to paraphrase internet sensation Oliver Anthony – by “rich men North of Richmond”. As the utopian encyclopedists of the 18th Century came to realize, “good science” does not come from ivory towers alone. Instead, it is achieved through wide collaborations and through the tireless scouting of the vast and centerless universe of knowledge.

Human culture has been evolving for over 200,000 years. It is, by far, the largest language model ever created, where the answers to all the riddles of the universe are hiding. Technology will never replace cultural evolution. But artificial intelligence can help us access and activate humanity’s aggregate collective intelligence in revolutionary new ways. A.I. powered universities can scout the ever-expanding universe of knowledge faster than ever imagined. But to do that both efficiently and ethically, they will need to include humans of all backgrounds in deeply interconnected global learning communities. Only algorithms written in multiple languages, by scientists and peer-reviewers of all credos and geographies, can help us decode and engage the powerful new knowledge hiding in both contemporary and ancestral cultures.

If artificial intelligence is to play a revolutionary role in science, good scientists and their funders must resist the totalitarian ambitions of trillion-dollar tech monopolies. 'Good science' – as human culture itself – must evolve in public domain, away from corporate ivory towers in the San Francisco Bay area or sterilized special zones in Zhejiang province. Throughout history, no other institution has been a safer harbor to the men and women of letters, and their discoveries, than universities.

To avoid the dilaceration of human intelligence, groundbreaking data scientists and computer engineers in Shenzhen and the Silicon Valley must stop paying so much attention to the apocalyptic false experts in Beijing and Washington. The real potential of artificial intelligence is not in cybernetic warzones, but in the underexplored frontiers of human intelligence. Likewise, scientific leaders and policy makers in Addis Ababa, Mumbai and São Paulo should stop being so obsessed about having more of their compatriots awarded with Nobel Prizes, or more global south universities featuring at the top of world rankings. If what they aspire is prominence in the 21st Century global knowledge economy, they should first be looking at the abundant reserves of indigenous knowledge in full display right in front of their eyes.

4. War and Peace – Last but not least, international higher education may help contain the high tide of authoritarianism in which our world is currently immersed. Universities cannot stop wars. But they have the inalienable responsibility to promote peace.

The world’s leading universities – most of them in the United States – are amongst the greatest marvels mankind has ever created. The science they produce and the citizens they mint continue to propel humanity to unimaginable new heights. But they do so because of freedoms and privileges that are not enjoyed by most organizations in the planet. As Ronald Daniels, President of John Hopkins University, correctly points out, American universities have a historic debt to pay to democracy. The same can be said about their enviable British and Western European counterparts.

Nonetheless, the wealth and prestige that the world’s top universities have achieved transcend the borders of the rich and free Western world. Those universities – more global than ever today – owe much of their greatness to their international scholars, students and alumni, who continue to shape the geopolitics of every continent on Earth. Besides, the 20 richest universities in the world – 19 of them American – sit on a combined endowment of nearly half a trillion dollars. Harvard University alone has an annual budget that is over four times that of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Rich global universities can – and should – do much more to foster peace and defend open societies around the world.

A good place to start would be to get rid of shameful legacy admissions practices, and to stop sending armed police to deal with peaceful faculty and student demonstrations. But if top global universities really want to aggrandize their reputation, there is a lot more they can do without sacrificing their stellar earnings or their sacredly low student-faculty ratios. Aided by the internet, universities in the rich world can deliver high-quality and life-changing training to teachers and learners in all corners of the planet at unprecedented scale and low cost. Highly compensated university executives could also spare some of the experience accumulated by their multi-century-old institutions to support the development of higher education systems in the developing world. Powered by artificial (and human) intelligence, wealthy universities in North America, Europe and Asia can push the frontiers of science not by competing amongst themselves in foolish reputational contests. But by shattering their departmental walls and engaging the peoples and knowledges that for long have been ignored by academia.

Students and young graduates from universities in the global north also have an important role to play. These days, even they are struggling to find purpose or well-paying careers in Wall Street, Paris and Tokyo. They must remember that the high-level education they earned is in high demand worldwide. More than coveted diplomas, highly trained citizens of the rich world have powerful passports in their pockets and strong embassies abroad.

The wars of the 21st Century, like the wars of all centuries before, will be decided by knowledge. However, in the hyper-informed, interdependent and highly interconnected world of today, the battle for knowledge has fundamentally changed in nature.

The winners of today and tomorrow will no longer be those – countries, armies, universities – that manage to have more knowledge than their opponents. But those who can waste less of it.

Phenomena like brain drain and scientific espionage, so typical of the Cold War Era, still populate our collective imaginary. But they no longer serve as accurate characterizations of today’s battles for intelligence. The existential wars against climate change, mass migrations and technological dystopias will be defined by humanity’s capacity to learn, observe, understand and participate in the world. More than super-computers or atomic weapons, higher education is our best shot to victory.