The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World

By Ben Wildavsky

How global competition for the brightest minds is changing higher education

In The Great Brain Race, former U.S. News & World Report education editor Ben Wildavsky presents the first popular account of how international competition for the brightest minds is transforming the world of higher education--and why this revolution should be welcomed, not feared. Every year, nearly three million international students study outside of their home countries, a 40 percent increase since 1999. Newly created or expanded universities in China, India, and Saudi Arabia are competing with the likes of Harvard and Oxford for faculty, students, and research preeminence. Satellite campuses of Western universities are springing up from Abu Dhabi and Singapore to South Africa. Wildavsky shows that as international universities strive to become world-class, the new global education marketplace is providing more opportunities to more people than ever before.

Drawing on extensive reporting in China, India, the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, Wildavsky chronicles the unprecedented international mobility of students and faculty, the rapid spread of branch campuses, the growth of for-profit universities, and the remarkable international expansion of college rankings. Some university and government officials see the rise of worldwide academic competition as a threat, going so far as to limit student mobility or thwart cross-border university expansion. But Wildavsky argues that this scholarly marketplace is creating a new global meritocracy, one in which the spread of knowledge benefits everyone--both educationally and economically. In a new preface, Wildavsky discusses some of the notable developments in global higher education since the book was first published.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Aug 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781400842001

Ben Wildavsky

Ben Wildavsky is a senior scholar in research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. Previously, he was education editor of U.S. News & World Report, economic policy correspondent for the National Journal, higher education reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, and executive editor of the Public Interest. He has written for the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Policy (among other publications) and is co-editor of Reinventing Higher Education: The Promise of Innovation. He has lectured widely in the United States and abroad.

Book preview

The Great Brain Race

The Great Brain Race

How Global Universities Are

Reshaping the World

Ben Wildavsky

With a new preface by the author

Copyright © 2010 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford

Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

Fourth printing, and first paperback printing, with a new preface, 2012

Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-15455-8

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED

THE CLOTH EDITION OF THIS BOOK AS FOLLOWS

Wildavsky, Ben.

The great brain race : how global universities are reshaping the world / Ben Wildavsky.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-14689-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Education, Higher. 2. Education and globalization.

3. Universities and colleges. 4. Competition, International. I. Title.

LB2322.2.W55 2010

306.43’2–dc22      2009052993

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Adobe Garamond and Stancia Lyrica

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

What Is Global Higher Education—and Why Does It Matter?

CHAPTER ONE

The Worldwide Race for Talent

CHAPTER TWO

Branching Out

CHAPTER THREE

Wanted: World-Class Universities

CHAPTER FOUR

College Rankings Go Global

CHAPTER FIVE

For-Profits on the Move

CHAPTER SIX

Free Trade in Minds

AFTERWORD

Notes

Index

IN MEMORY OF MY FATHER

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Keeping up with the twists and turns of higher education globalization could easily be a full-time job, as I’ve discovered in the two years since The Great Brain Race was first published. The opportunity to continue writing and speaking about the global academic marketplace brought with it the responsibility of interpreting a gush of new developments—so many as to bring to mind the old saw about drinking from a fire hose.

Humility is always called for when trying to understand a phenomenon that is moving and changing so quickly. For now, though, the trends outlined in these pages seem to be proceeding apace: intense competition to recruit students; unprecedented academic mobility; the spread of branch campuses; the quest to create world-class research universities; the rise of global college rankings; the growing role of for-profit postsecondary institutions; and the realization around the world that human capital is the key to innovation and economic growth.

Amid all these developments, I see continued evidence that supports the core thesis of The Great Brain Race: that building knowledge is not a zero-sum game, that all countries should avoid academic protectionism, and that they should instead do everything possible to promote what I call free trade in minds.

At the same time, it should not be surprising that a world of ever-more-mobile students and quickly changing institutions is also characterized by ongoing worries and problems. This is only what one would expect from a fast-growing, freewheeling marketplace whose future character and scope are far from settled.

The sheer dimensions of student mobility continue to be unprecedented, even during a period of worldwide financial disarray. In the year 2000, two million students ventured outside their home countries to seek further education. By 2009, according to the latest available numbers from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, global student mobility had risen to 3.7 million—a remarkable 85 percent increase.

This growth has been accompanied by rising postsecondary enrollment in many countries, which reduces the rate of increase as a proportion of all students. Still, the rapid rise in student mobility has transformed campuses around the world. In Australia, it is now considered unremarkable that institutions such as the University of Sydney enroll more than 5,000 Chinese students in a student body of 47,000. The university, like some others, holds graduation ceremonies every year in Beijing, Shanghai, and other Chinese cities, so that families and friends of its Chinese graduates can celebrate with them. But universities much farther from the beaten path have also seen the influence of internationalization. At Pittsburg State University in rural southern Kansas, which focuses on undergraduate education rather than high-powered research, the total enrollment of 7,000 includes 500 international students from several dozen countries, among them 115 Saudi students on government scholarships. The university has set up a recruiting office in Hyderabad to bring in more Indian students. And more than one in ten faculty members is foreign-born.

Even as students flock to foreign countries to pursue degrees, universities are also continuing their efforts to establish branch campuses catering to students who want to stay home while pursuing international education. These satellite institutions remain controversial and some have struggled or closed. One highly publicized failure came in July 2011, when Michigan State University closed its Dubai campus after its enrollment projections proved to be too optimistic.

Yet other campuses are thriving—Scotland-based Heriot-Watt University is doing very well in Dubai. And new ventures continue to be announced. Duke University, which already has a medical school in Singapore, is now planning a small campus in China focused initially on business. Carnegie Mellon University has announced plans to create a branch campus in Rwanda. Yale University is creating an undergraduate campus in Singapore, in partnership with the National University of Singapore (NUS), to be called Yale–NUS College. Notwithstanding some attention-grabbing failures, a January 2012 report by the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education counted 200 branch campuses around the world, up from 162 campuses in 2009, when the group conducted a survey using a somewhat different definition. The Observatory reported that another 37 satellite campuses are set to open in 2012 or 2013, with activity shifting from the Middle East to Asia.

Will branch campuses continue to spread? There isn’t a simple answer, in part because these institutions take many different forms, with many different funding sources and revenue models. Interest in earning Western degrees certainly remains high, and the appeal for students around the world of earning a prized credential while staying close to home seems sure to continue. But even where governments are footing the bill, long-term sustainability is a question mark. The host nation’s regulatory regime matters a lot, as does the need of Western institutions to maintain quality, which can be a particularly difficult proposition when setting up shop far from their home campuses. Branch campuses are at heart entrepreneurial ventures. Some will succeed, some will fail, and it will take time for universities to figure out which models, if any, are best replicated in which locations.

For all the attention that has been devoted to branch campuses—including in this book—their enrollment is tiny compared to the rest of the world’s postsecondary institutions. But they remain powerful symbols, not just of worldwide demand for Western education but of the potential such education may have to liberalize Middle Eastern and Asian countries that often don’t enjoy the freedoms that mark liberal democracies. As with New York University’s foray into Abu Dhabi, new ventures such as Yale’s Singapore campus have become instantly controversial. Opponents believe that it is simply not appropriate for institutions devoted to free expression and the unfettered search for the truth to be operating in countries that don’t enjoy complete political liberty, including freedom of speech. Yale and other universities say their due diligence has persuaded them that they won’t be compromising their core values by opening these campuses. Indeed, in some countries where branch campuses have opened there’s modest evidence that Western campuses have had a gradual liberalizing effect—simply by spreading coeducation and an ethos that encourages open debate. But these changes are incremental and uneven, and it is uncertain whether they will last. Unless Western satellite campuses are built on a foundation of free inquiry, it seems unlikely that they will accomplish anything of enduring value.

If the future of branch campuses is uncertain, the globalization of academic research shows no signs of slowing. American universities continue to dominate the global research landscape, but other nations are making energetic, ongoing efforts to build their own world-class universities. The resulting ferment has intensified the anxieties described in the book’s first edition about the threat posed to Western preeminence by rising universities in the rest of the world. But a number of new developments on the research front provide fresh evidence that the rising prowess of scientists elsewhere need not be a threat to the research strengths of the West in general, and the United States in particular.

To be sure, there’s no question that the growing research aspirations of emerging countries have eroded the long-standing dominance of North America, the European Union, and Japan. Asia’s share of the world’s research and development spending grew from 27 to 32 percent from 2002 to 2007, led mostly by China, India, and South Korea, according to a 2010 UNESCO report on the changing geographic distribution of academic research. The traditional research leaders saw decreases during the same period. From 2002 to 2008, the U.S. proportion of articles in the Thomson Reuters Science Citation Index, the authoritative database of research publications, fell further than any other country’s, from 30.9 to 27.7 percent. Meanwhile, the number of Chinese publications recorded in the same index more than doubled, as did the volume of scientific papers from Brazil, a country whose research institutions wouldn’t have been on anyone’s radar twenty years ago.

This shift in the geography of knowledge production is certainly noteworthy, but as with the international study market, the declining market share held by the United States simply represents a somewhat smaller slice of a greatly expanded pie. R&D spending worldwide surged massively in the last decade, from $790 billion to $1.1 trillion, up 45 percent. And the declining U.S. share of global research spending still represented a healthy increase in constant dollars, from $277 billion in 2002 to $373 billion in 2007. U.S. research spending as a percentage of GDP over the same period was consistent and very high by global standards. The country’s R&D investments still totaled more than all Asian countries’ combined.

Similarly, a declining U.S. share of the world’s scientific publications may sound bad from an American point of view. But the total number of publications listed in the Thomson Reuters index jumped by more than a third from 2002 to 2008. Even with a shrinking global lead, U.S. researchers published 46,000 more scientific articles in 2008 than they had six years earlier. In any case, as I argue in these pages, research discoveries don’t remain within the borders of the countries where they occur—knowledge is a public good, with little regard for national boundaries. Discoveries in one country’s research institutions can be capitalized on by innovators elsewhere. As Amar Bhidé writes in The Venturesome Economy: A Briton invented the protocols of the World Wide Web—in a lab in Switzerland. A Swede and a Dane in Tallinn, Estonia, started Skype, the leading provider of peer-to-peer Internet telephony. How did the foreign origins of these innovations harm the U.S. economy? Countries shouldn’t be indifferent to their share of the world’s research—big breakthroughs can have positive economic and academic spillover effects. But they also shouldn’t fear the increase of cutting-edge discoveries elsewhere.

Nor should countries around the world fear the growing movement of students across borders. Unfortunately, however, another constant since publication of The Great Brain Race is the ambivalence provoked in many nations by the presence of large numbers of foreign students. From Australia and the United States to France and the United Kingdom, universities’ desire to enroll foreign students—whether for their brainpower, the tuition revenues they bring, or both—coexists uneasily with immigration policies that too often thwart the desires of graduates who want to stay on and join the host country’s workforce.

The resulting tensions have sometimes led to policy flip-flops. In 2009, Australia tightened visa rules significantly for students wishing to study at universities, vocational colleges, and language schools. The goal was to crack down on visa scams that were letting unsavory trade school operators essentially sell work permits to foreign students. But the ensuing drop in foreign student numbers (also attributable to the rise in the Australian dollar) led to alarm in a postsecondary sector heavily dependent on those students. The government relaxed many of the restrictions, particularly those affecting universities, following a 2011 review by a former government minister.

Meantime, in France, stepped-up immigration restrictions introduced in 2011 made it harder for foreign students from outside the European Union to receive work permits after graduating. A national policy to increase the number of foreign students, which had grown from 138,000 to 218,000 in the past decade, came into conflict with recent efforts to curtail immigration of all kinds, which affected foreign graduates first. That raised alarm among university officials very much aware of the link between foreign study and postgraduation work opportunities. You reduce the attractiveness of universities if you do this. [Students are] not attracted by universities if they have to go back home immediately afterwards, said Conférence des Présidents d’Université president Louis Vogel. The government eventually dropped the restrictions.

The United States faces its own ongoing anxieties about foreign students, particularly those who want to stay on after graduation. Notwithstanding the huge appeal of American universities as a destination for foreign students over the past half century, immigration restrictions make it hard for many talented graduates to stay on. That threatens to erode U.S. universities’ continued appeal—and to deprive the American economy of prized human capital. President Obama stressed the latter point in a 2011 speech about immigration delivered in El Paso, Texas. Today, we provide students from around the world with visas to get engineering and computer science degrees at our top universities, he said. But then our laws discourage them from using those skills to start a business or a new industry here in the United States. . . . [This] makes no sense.

One can certainly make a case that more restrictive visa and regulatory policies are the best protection against fraud and abuse in international education, as articulated by analysts such as Boston College’s Philip Altbach (who has also been an outspoken opponent of Western universities’ use of third-party recruiters and agents to bring in full-fee-paying foreign students). After all, who could be against cracking down on visa scams, fly-by-night colleges, and shoddy academic standards? But this is not the whole story, of course. Restrictions on the ability of foreign students to stay on to work after graduation often carry with them a heavy undercurrent of domestic protectionism, and at times even xenophobia. Yet we have ample evidence of the importance of human capital to economic growth. For example, research by the Kauffman Foundation has shown that immigrant entrepreneurs, many of them graduates of U.S. universities, have played a large role in high-growth Silicon Valley start-ups. That’s why so many advocates of U.S. policies that favor skilled immigration have called for issuing green cards offering permanent residency to foreign graduates in certain fields together with their diplomas.

As I argued when this book was first published, it seems terribly shortsighted to err on the side of tightening study and work visas for foreign students, in the United States and elsewhere, given the significant benefits of greater openness. There are plenty of scams to be found in, say, online education or standardized testing. But it would be foolish to cite those problems as justification for heavily restricting promising education technology innovations or for junking test-based accountability measures. Certainly, the study-work connection needs oversight in every country. As we’ve already seen, however, excessively restrictive immigration policies toward foreign students threaten not only revenues but academic excellence on campuses. They threaten something else that national policymakers should value, too: the presence of highly motivated and trained foreign graduates in workforces that would surely benefit from all the fresh talent they can get.

Indeed, the competition for talent—and for the best opportunities—remains a central feature of academic globalization, and continues to drive demand for an open flow of information about how universities stack up against one another. So it is no surprise that the flawed but hugely popular array of global university rankings continues to expand and evolve. The overhaul of the Times Higher Education rankings that was announced in late 2009 was implemented one year later, with predictable controversy over the changed methodology. The following year, the European Commission unveiled the prototype of its own U-Multirank assessment scheme. The newly developed system uses metrics in five areas—teaching and learning, research, knowledge transfer, international orientation, and regional engagement—to allow users, whether students, universities, or employers, to use their own weightings to rank universities.

Another experiment discussed in the hardcover edition of this book, the AHELO project launched by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, is continuing to attract considerable interest, although its future prospects remain uncertain. AHELO—the acronym stands for the Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes—is in the midst of a multistage feasibility study in fifteen countries, including the United States, Mexico, Finland, Egypt, Japan, and Australia. Small groups of students are being tested in generic skills such as analytical reasoning, as well as in economics and engineering. Over the longer term, AHELO analysts would like to go beyond taking a snapshot of learning to coming up with measures of value added—helping answer the elusive question of how much students improve academically during their time at university.

AHELO is not intended to be a ranking. But assessment measures of all kinds, whatever their imperfections, and whether or not they are called rankings, have the potential to be important consumer tools in a border-free educational world. When done well (and I believe rankings are already on the path to improvement) they can foster transparency, expose weak research, highlight effective instruction, and give universities the information they need to build the research and human capital on which innovation and economic growth depend.

Beyond rankings, the list of new developments in global higher education goes on and on. Some institutions, like New York University, continue to forge new paths—the university has broken ground on a new campus in Shanghai, to be headed by Jeffrey Lehman, former president of Cornell University—while at the same time tweaking or reassessing their existing global ventures. NYU initially conceived of NYU–Abu Dhabi as a magnet for talented students from the Gulf, other Middle Eastern countries, and India, with a sizable number of U.S. students mixed in. Instead, the undergraduate college it launched, led by former Swarthmore president Alfred Bloom, recruits and generously funds top students from around the world. Many other colleges and universities, including elite research institutions, small liberal arts colleges, and mass-access public universities, are continuing to think through whether, when, and how they should launch or deepen their efforts to participate in the global marketplace.

The answers are by no means obvious, particularly at a time when potentially disruptive changes in higher education are emerging. There are the for-profits, of course, described at some length in the book’s first edition, which continue to multiply around the world, in some cases forging partnerships with traditional institutions. And there is the rapid spread of online learning, used heavily by for-profits and increasingly in the traditional sector, making cross-border educational ventures easier than ever. Indeed, one much-noted new institution, the University of the People, aims to democratize postsecondary education by offering tuition-free online college classes in business and computer science to students in more than one hundred countries, who need only possess a high school diploma and demonstrate English proficiency.

At the other end of the prestige spectrum, Stanford University also made headlines in the 2011–12 academic year when two renowned researchers, Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun and Google scientist Peter Norvig, offered their Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course as a free online class to students around the world. Unlike earlier high-profile open courseware efforts by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale, the Stanford venture permits students not only to view class materials and watch video lectures but to submit homework assignments, sit for multiple-choice quizzes and exams, and participate in virtual office hours. More than 160,000 students signed up. By the time the midterm exam came around, Inside Higher Ed reported, 23,000 non-Stanford students around the world took the test, many scoring as well as the 175 students who sat for the exam in Palo Alto. Crucially, students completing the class received no Stanford credit—but those who passed the final did receive a statement of accomplishment. Thrun created still more buzz when he announced in January 2012 that he was launching a start-up company, Udacity, offering low-cost online classes. He hopes to attract 500,000 students to courses such as How to Build a Search Engine.

Such ventures and experiments are closely watched in the United States, and they have much relevance for the future direction of globalized education. Many observers have suggested that we are moving toward an unbundling of the core university functions that have traditionally been provided on a single physical campus: teaching, social and intellectual interaction, awarding of credentials, and, in some instances, research. Academic content is already being delivered in a variety of new ways—online, in person, and as a mixture of both—to students whose work and family commitments may take priority over social interaction with their peers on a traditional campus. This separation of teaching from the conventional college setting seems only likely to continue—not for all students, but for many more than today.

At the same time, the credentialing function of colleges and universities may also be eroding, or at least giving way to a world in which wider access to education is accompanied by the availability of objective measures of attainment beyond university walls. That could blur the role of brand-name gatekeepers, while also calling into question the significant expense students must often incur to earn their degrees. In late 2011, not long after Stanford’s experiment got under way, MIT announced a new MITx venture that will offer certificates to students who complete a new array of online classes and show that they have mastered the course material. MITx will offer no actual MIT credit. But its credentials will become, as higher education analyst Kevin Carey suggests, a new form of academic currency, both in the United States and around the world. Acceptance of this currency will surely not be automatic. But it may only be a matter of time before at least some employers, and some universities, accept such credentials as evidence that students have gained the skills they need for jobs, or the scholarly knowledge they need to be granted transfer credit.

In this emerging world, traditional educational offerings and institutions will certainly not fade away. The appeal of top Western research institutions seems likely to continue around the world—whether as destinations for outbound students, as models for domestic institutions that aspire to excellence, or as sought-after partners in international research collaborations. American-style residential liberal arts colleges, too, have attracted growing interest overseas, especially in Asian countries that would like to see their students emulate the spirit of inquiry and creativity associated with this educational approach. But new models, accessible to an ever-wider range of students, are inevitable. Following the launch of ventures such as Udacity, the University of the People, and MITx, the world of MOOCs (massively open online courses) continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Among other new entrants, Harvard and MIT made a splash with their May 2012 announcement of a new joint venture called edX, which the universities said aims to enhance campus-based teaching and learning and build a global community of online learners.

It would be naïve to envision the road to academic globalization as invariably smooth. There is already ample evidence that this is not, and will not be, the case. So, too, with the related changes in postsecondary education that innovators are rapidly introducing, experimenting with, abandoning, or improving upon. Ultimately, though, I remain cautiously optimistic, as I was when the first edition of this book went to press, that the forces of mobility, competition, meritocracy, and innovation are empowering for students, for universities, and for nations. Progress will be rapid at times, incremental at others. Over time, though, the global revolution in higher education makes the prospect that individuals will be able to get ahead based on what they know, not who they are, greater than ever.

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been written had I not had the good fortune to join the Kauffman Foundation in the spring of 2006. Carl Schramm, the foundation’s remarkable president and CEO, has demonstrated repeatedly, by his own example, his desire to make Kauffman not simply a grant-making organization but also a place of ideas. Almost from the moment I started work, Carl urged me to write a book. Once a suitable idea took form in my mind, he offered me unstinting support and remarkable flexibility during the research and writing phases. I am deeply grateful for his encouragement.

My other great debt at Kauffman is to Bob Litan. I first met Bob over the phone when I was a magazine journalist seeking an expert to discuss an international trade dispute involving, I recall, Mexican tomatoes. Years later, after he became vice president for research and policy at Kauffman, Bob played a key role in bringing me to the foundation. His never-ending enthusiasm and creative energy helped launch this project, sustain it, and bring it to completion. Among other things, he read every outline and every chapter, offering valuable suggestions and support at each point in the process. In all the roles in which I have known Bob—journalistic source, recruiter, boss, and mentor—he has served as a wise sounding board and tireless intellectual guide. I am lucky to work with him.

Many other Kauffman colleagues helped along the way. Indira Dammu was a summer intern at the foundation in 2008 and continued working as my research assistant during her senior year at Indiana University. She kept assiduous track of new developments in global higher education and wrote research memos that I drew on extensively when writing the chapters on student mobility and world-class universities. Her efforts were indispensable. Mindee Forman helped get the book to the finish line. In the final months of the project, she performed last-minute research, checked and double-checked facts and endnotes on deadline, read the entire manuscript, and offered useful editorial suggestions—all with the good cheer, efficiency, and tech-savvy for which she is well known at the foundation. Alyse Freilich, a gifted editor, read large parts of the manuscript and improved it substantially with her suggestions. I was fortunate to get feedback from many others at Kauffman during an in-house work-in-progress presentation.

Kauffman associates provided other kinds of assistance, too, whether planning logistics for my extensive travels, connecting me to overseas contacts, suggesting interview subjects closer to home, helping with book promotion, or simply providing encouragement and brainstorming help. I thank all these colleagues, including Melody Dellinger, Norma Getz, Wendy Guillies, Tim Kane, Lesa Mitchell, Glory Olson, Margo Quiriconi, E. J. Reedy, Munro Richardson, Trayce Riley, Thom Ruhe, Dane Stangler, Bob Strom, Joy Torchia, Wendy Torrance, and John Tyler.

I have also been fortunate to find a second home as a guest scholar in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. I am grateful to Pietro Nivola, former head of the department, for bringing me on board, to his successor, Darrell West, for keeping me, and to a fantastic group of colleagues for providing helpful feedback throughout my book project. I benefited enormously from presenting my work at an in-house Research in Progress lunch, and from ongoing conversations with Governance Studies colleagues, including Sarah Binder, Bill Galston, Jonathan Rauch, Kent Weaver, and Russ Whitehurst. I had useful discussions with others at Brookings, too, including Bill Antholis and Belle Sawhill. Brookings’ crack librarians, especially Sarah Chilton and Laura Mooney, helped me in numerous ways. Korin Davis, Ellen Higgins, Christine Jacobs, and other colleagues helped organize a launch event for the book. All in all, I couldn’t ask for a more stimulating and congenial work environment.

I owe further appreciation to the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. Its president, Dan Polisar, generously offered me the use of an office as I was finishing my manuscript in the summer of 2009. This enabled me to spend a glorious summer in Jerusalem with my family while also getting a significant amount of work done. My research talk at Shalem on global college rankings, organized