Enjoy It While It Lasts

The Post reports a huge influx of highly-qualified students from China applying as undergraduates to elite American universities. At the University of Virginia, the number grew from 60 in 2005 to 816 in 2009. At Brown University, 166 to 500, and so on. This shows, once again, the huge advantage we have in being home to lion’s share of the world’s top-notch colleges and universities in the era of globalization. Assuming U.S. / Chinese relations stay reasonably stable and anti-immigration crazy people don’t get their way, increasing numbers of very smart, motivated students from the other side of the world will come to America to live, learn, start businesses, make important discoveries, and otherwise improve our way of life.
But it won’t last forever. It’s clear that, given the opportunity, elite American universities are prone to implement discriminatory admissions policies that artificially limit the number of American students of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese descent. So I’m pretty sure that the number of Chinese students of Chinese descent who are admitted will only grow so much. Hard quotas will be implemented, and most of the best and brightest Chinese undergrads will have to look elsewhere. There’s just no way to get around the numbers: China alone is nearly 4.5 times larger than the U.S. and the percent of Chinese students with access to an education pipeline that can bring them to college is growing.
Eventually, other colleges and universities will find a place for them and their peers from India, Africa, South America, and elsewhere. Some of those institutions could be American, but many will be in Europe or students’ home nations. Filled to the brim with the world’s smartest students, their academic reputations will rise relative to elite American institutions that are hamstrung by narrow-minded admissions policies and an unwillingness to grow to meet surging demand. Eventually, someone’s going to realize that it’s perfectly feasible to build an institution of higher education that can, with a combination of physical infrastructure and technology, serve several hundred thousand undergraduates from around the world, all admitted purely on their merits, at once. Whatever nation gets there first will enjoy all the benefits that we do today.