Editors Andrew Jaspan and Bharat Bhushan of 360info spoke to Professor Adam Habib about the challenges and possibilities of globalised higher education. What do you think is wrong with global education? There’s a lot wrong. In many parts of the developing world, their institutions are being eroded by the very nature of the ‘global academy’. For example, scholarships provided largely by rich-country universities and governments go to talented people from around the world, allowing them to travel to study. Then, they don’t go back. Many of those do so in their 20s and 30s – precisely the period in life when people tend to develop relationships and have children. The net effect is that brain drain is enabled rather than disabled. Developing states lose people in large numbers and, as that happens, you begin to erode institutional capacities. When you talk about undermining institutional capacity, what do you mean? I mean that you don’t enable the kinds of crucial skilled personnel required to deliver on major public services within developing countries and deal with ways to mitigate the major challenges of our time such as pandemics and climate change. I’m speaking about those countries needing the kinds of professionals required to run modern economies and societies, through either public institutions like hospitals, schools, universities, governments, governmental departments, or private facilities like private companies, businesses, manufacturing industries, IT companies, startups etc. This is why if you take a place like South Africa, which I know well, you have both a skills deficit and an unemployment crisis. You don’t have the people trained for the jobs that are available. This is a serious problem. Other than Singapore and a couple of other places, such as post-2007 China, developing countries are losing large numbers of key people to run and develop their critical infrastructure, services and economy. In India, the numbers suggest that more than 80 percent of students who go to study overseas don’t return home. There’s no data about Africa, but I would think that it would be worse than India, just anecdotally. And so you’ve got a serious challenge that, at the very moment those countries need the brightest and best, you’re weakening their institutions and human capabilities. Some countries can sustain this. India and China, both with 1.4 billion people, can sustain the brain drain because they have scale. Places that are much smaller — South Africa, with 50 million people, and many other parts of the African continent and other societies — don’t have that scale, and so the drain has a much more dramatic impact on institutional capacities. All the substantive challenges of our time have a transnational character, whether it’s pandemics or climate change, inequality or social and political polarisation. To resolve those challenges, we’ll need to ensure that the developing world has intellectual capacities and skills. You’re going to need them as much in the Philippines as in New York or London. Any research will tell you that the world’s key transnational problems require not only world-class global science and technology but also local knowledge. For example, how you structure a city map in San Francisco is fundamentally different from how you structure a city map in Nairobi simply because of the spatial structure of Nairobi. It operates in a different environment, and its cultural milieu and naming of streets don’t work in the same way. It has shantytowns too, and all these kinds of things lend themselves to a very, very different design. Linking global science and local knowledge is needed, and at the moment the global education system undermines that. Do you think that universities in the West use foreign students to cross-subsidise domestic students? Absolutely. Not all Western countries, but if you’re looking at the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and, frankly, a number of Western European countries, there’s a massive cross-subsidisation. There is no way British higher education could survive if the supply and fees from foreign students suddenly dried up. In fact, I would argue 90 percent of the universities would be declared bankrupt overnight. I’ve said this in the United Kingdom, so I’m not saying anything new: it’s unsustainable, and sooner or later it’s going to throw them into a crisis. Given governments are either not funding universities or reducing their financial assistance to universities, is it wrong for universities to be modelled as commercial enterprises and profit from the demand? It depends on what lens you are asking through.