In June, students of Shengda College, in Xinzheng, China, staged a violent protest. Riot police were called in, the campus was locked down and the headmaster eventually resigned.

The students rioted because they had received diplomas imprinted with the name of their college rather than the name of the more prestigious Zhengzhou University, Shengda's nominal mother school, which they claimed had been promised to them.

The unusual cause of this rampage reveals much about the role of higher education in today's global marketplace. Implicit in the incident is the recognition that a college degree is an indispensable passport to the globalized knowledge economy of the 21st century. There was, of course, another message: a diploma from the "right" university is incomparably more valuable than just any old degree.

Meritocracy be damned: pedigree counts.

Both of these messages would seem to bode well for U.S. universities. Since the end of World War II, the United States has been recognized as the world leader in higher education. It has more colleges and universities, enrolls and graduates more students and spends more on advanced education and research than any other nation.

It would also seem that higher education is a market ripe for globalization, and that U.S. universities, by right of their acknowledged achievements, outstanding reputations and considerable advantages in size and wealth, are destined to take on the world.

But as the president of a U.S. university that has operated one campus in China for two decades, and another campus in Italy for more than half a century, I can say that consolidating American dominance in international education will not be as easy or as likely as it seems.

Today, knowledge is disseminated in seconds and flawed information is quickly exposed. This is the effect of the "it-it phenomenon": cheap international travel and ubiquitous information technology combine to disassociate expertise from place. Like faculty, students — particularly graduate students — are drawn from a global pool. In U.S. universities today, roughly a third of all graduate students in science and engineering and more than half of all postdoctoral students are foreign nationals.

Just as geographic boundaries have become less distinct in higher education, the walls between academic disciplines within universities are being torn down. Today, research universities have multiple campuses. Johns Hopkins, for instance, has more than a dozen sites in the United States, operates research projects in 80 countries, and will probably have even more campuses in the future.

All these forces suggest the arrival of an entirely new institution: the global "megaversity." Three factors, however, suggest a somewhat different future.

First, there is the weight of tradition. Colleges around the world may vary considerably in their layout and architecture, but almost every campus is a place apart.

The second issue is the problem of national boundaries. Every nation in one way or another makes significant financial contributions to its resident universities and demands considerable returns in exchange, both in numbers of qualified graduates and in terms of the economic benefits that the education and research provide.

Finally, as is so often the case, the advent of a Global U. really comes down to a question of money. To be successful — even to stay in business — a global university would somehow have to garner consistent and dependable financial support from many different nations.

Universities, like houses of worship, are among the few institutions that have survived fundamentally unchanged for centuries. This inertia has been their intrinsic advantage. Yet today they are subject to the same forces and stresses created by globalization that confront all other aspects of society.

For nearly three-quarters of a century, scientific research was largely the province of the United States and Europe. Now, emerging countries — especially in Asia — increasingly are significant contributors to science and technology, and this trend is likely to continue for the next half century or more. Existing research universities are liable to lose their leading role unless they are able to form, or join, worldwide networks of researchers working at the frontiers of knowledge.

At first blush, it seems hard to imagine two less similar entities than a multinational oil company and a prestigious regional research university. Yet they are very similar in this one respect: both must ultimately respond to the fundamental need to go where the resources are.

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William R. Brody is president of The Johns Hopkins University. This article was adapted from an essay appearing in the March/April 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs.

© 2007 The Johns Hopkins University. Baltimore, Maryland. All rights reserved.
Last updated 11Mar07 by dgips@jhu.edu