There used to be three near-certainties about higher education. It was supplied on a national basis, mostly to local students. It was government-regulated. And competition and profit were almost unknown concepts. As most education was publicly funded, the state had a big say in what was taught, to how many and for how long. Insofar as it existed at all, competition was a gentlemanly business; few educators thought much about customers, fewer about profit. How that has changed. Higher education is now international in a way it has not been since the heyday of Europe's great medieval universities-and on a vastly greater scale. Numbers studying abroad were statistically negligible only two decades ago, says Andreas Schleicher, of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a Paris-based think-tank.
展开▼
