Since the late 1990s, one of the most interesting examples of global policy convergence has been in the field of higher education.   Pretty much regardless of where you go, you'll find that higher education is higher up the policy priority scale now than it was fifteen years ago.  Partly, that's due to an enormous increase in demand for higher education on the part of the citizenry and a concomitant increase in access (global enrolments have basically doubled since the late 90s).  But it also has to do with a profound change in elite perceptions of how the economy works, and how universities feed into innovation and economic growth.

 The recessions of the 1990s - which started and ended earlier in North America than in Europe - finally put paid to any lingering fantasies that public borrowing and tinkering with macro-economic demand-management were sufficient on their own to maintain economic growth.  What emerged instead was a policy consensus in the developed nations on the centrality of innovation to economic growth.  Apart from a number of regulatory issues around product competition and taxation, the innovation agenda meant improving general skill levels of the work force, and it meant increasing the number of "Highly Qualified Personnel" (HQPs) - which is essentially a euphemism for PhDs in science, engineering, medicine, finance and economics. 

HQPs are thought to be essential to economic growth because of their position at the cutting edge of knowledge.  Put a lot of these people together in a place near some venture capital, it is thought, and you've got yourself an economic bonanza; a steady stream of new discoveries, many of which are commercializable and hence capable of generating new jobs and growth.  Of course, venture capital is actually quite tricky to attract and commercialization is nothing like straightforward, but no matter - the policy imperative has been to amass HQPs.

On this view, HQPs are an enormously important - and notably scarce - factor of modern economic production.  As recently as a few decades ago, major powers would go to war over scarce resources like this.  But there is no question that state power is being increasingly organized to produce, attract and effectively hoard HQPs. 

An intriguing thing about HQPs is that although they are very important economic actors, for many of them, economic output is a distinctly secondary pre-occupation.  It is the production of knowledge that matters, not the production of widgets.  What they really care about is being in an environment where they can produce as much knowledge as possible.  What's more, HQPs are a lumpy resource.  You don't tend to find them in ones and twos spread thinly around a country; rather, they tend to cluster near one another, where they can interact, learn from one another and multiply their effectiveness.   

The foci of these clusters always involve universities; either it is the universities themselves, or research parks or districts that have grown up as a result of universities (think of Stanford and Silicon Valley or MIT/Harvard and Route 138).    Therefore, as countries become more concerned about attracting and hoarding HQPs, universities - and in particular their research functions, which are of greatest importance to HQPs - are increasingly becoming instruments of state power. 

The idea of research universities as instruments of state power is not new; indeed, the research university originated in Germany 200 years ago for precisely this purpose.  But back then, the idea was simply that local HQPs (who back then were simply called scholars) would produce scholarship that would benefit the state.  What's changed is that institutions are expected to play this role by becoming honeytraps for foreign HQPs.  That means that the focus is increasingly on not the overall production of scholarship, but on increasing the attractiveness of institutions to the very, very top scholars of the world.  This is the Geopolitics of Higher Education; the absorption of institutions into a concerted attempt to fight over the globally scarce resource of HQPs.

How scarce?  There is probably something on the order of 100,000 truly high-profile scholars and academic scientists in the world - people that reasonable quality institutions would bother fighting over.  Canada's share of these is in the region of about 3% of the world total (based on our overall weight in major citation indexes) - about 3,000 in total or maybe about 10% of our full-time academics.  Our higher education system is gradually being re-shaped to meet the needs of this elite, so that institutions can more effectively compete in this "War for Erudition."

Hence the large increases in granting council funding over the past decade.  Hence the Canada Foundation for Innovation.  Hence the Canada Research Chairs Program.  It's all about competing for that top 10 per cent, and attracting more professors of similar calibre to Canada, because policy makers believe that they hold important keys to our economic future.  And academic institutions - which have always associated research with prestige - are happy to agree with them and act as their handmaidens.

Though Canada was among the first wave of countries to understand higher education in this way, we're hardly alone.  The Canada Research Chairs Program has been widely noted and in some cases copied.  Countries like Germany, France and China are all pouring money into various types of "excellence initiatives."  And these tend to focus on a very small number of institutions. By international standards, Canada spreads its research dollars much more thinly than other countries.  This has some benefits in terms of ensuring that excellence is well-distributed, but it has the drawback that it is probably less effective than it could be at enticing top scholars from abroad into a few genuinely powerful universities. 

As the size of the working-aged population stops growing across the developed world, the search for major leaps in productivity are intensifying.  As a result, the "War for Erudition" is only going to get worse.  But there are a lot of potential casualties in this war, the main one being the quality of undergraduate education.  There's not a province in Canada where this features in the current policy agenda and there's not even really an identifiable voice in Canada arguing for it any more.  That's a serious problem, given that teaching students is what most students and parents think their tuition and tax dollars are actually paying for.

Higher education is part of the geopolitics of the 21st century; that's a given.  But success in this game should not come at the expense of the traditional but still vital goals of access and quality at the undergraduate level.  Next, I'll look at what tools policy makers should be using to make sure that's not the case.