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Universities Branch Out
As never before in their long history, universities have become instruments
of national competition as well as instruments of peace. They are the place of
the scientific discoveries that move economies forward, and the primary means of
educating the talent required to obtain and maintain competitive advantage. But
at the same time, the opening of national borders to the flow of goods,
services, information and especially people has made universities a powerful
force for global integration, mutual understanding and geopolitical
stability.
In response to the same forces that have driven the world economy,
universities have become more self-consciously global: seeking students form
around the world who represent the entire range of cultures and values, sending
their own students abroad to prepare them for global careers, offering courses
of study that address the challenges of an interconnected world and
collaborative (合作的) research programs to advance science for the benefit of all
humanity.
Of the forces shaping higher education none is more sweeping than the
movement across borders. Over the past three decades the number of students
leaving home each year to study abroad has grown at an annual rate of 3.9
percent, from 800,000 in 1975 to 2.5 million in 2004. Most travel from one
developed nation to another, but the flow from developing to developed countries
is growing rapidly. The reverse flow, from developed to developing countries, is
on the rise, too. Today foreign students earn 30 percent of the doctoral degrees
awarded in the United States and 38 percent of those in the United Kingdom. And
the number crossing borders for undergraduate study is growing as well, to 8
percent of the undergraduates at America’s best institutions and 10 percent of
all undergraduates in the U.K. In the United States, 20 percent of the newly
hired professors in science and engineering are foreign-born, and in China many
newly hired faculty members at the top research universities received their
graduate education abroad.
Universities are also encouraging students to spend some of their
undergraduate years in another country. In Europe, more than 140,000 students
participate in the Erasmus program each year, taking courses for credit in one
of 2,200 participating institutions across the continent. And in the United
States, institutions are helping place students in summer internships (实习)
abroad to prepare them for global careers. Yale and Harvard have led the way,
offering every undergraduate at least one international study or internship
opportunity-and providing the financial resources to make it possible.
Globalization is also reshaping the way research is done. One new trend
involves sourcing portions of a research program to another country. Yale
professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Tian Xu directs a
research center focused on the genetics of human disease at Shanghai’s Fudan
University, in collaboration with faculty colleagues from both schools. The
Shanghai center has 95 employees and graduate students working in a
4,300-square-meter laboratory facility. Yale faculty, postdoctors and graduate
students visit regularly and attend videoconference seminars with scientists
from both campuses. The arrangement benefits both countries; Xu’s Yale lab is
more productive, thanks to the lower costs of conducting research in china, and
Chinese graduate students, postdoctors and faculty get on-the-job training from
a world-class scientist and his U.S. team.
As a result of its strength in science, the United States has consistently
led the world in the commercialization of major new technologies, from the
mainframe computer and the integrated circuit of the 1960s to the Internet
infrastructure (基础设施) and applications software of the 1990s. The link between
university-based science and industrial application is often indirect but
sometimes highly visible: Silicon Valley was intentionally created by Stanford
University, and Route 128 outside Boston has long housed companies spun off from
MIT and Harvard. Around the world, governments have encouraged copying of this
model, perhaps most successfully in Cambridge, England, where Microsoft and
scores of other leading software and biotechnology companies have set up shop
around the university.
For all its success, the United States remains deeply hesitant about
sustaining the research-university model. Most politician recognize the link
between investment in science and national economic strength, but support for
research funding has been unsteady. The budget of the National Institutes of
Health doubled between 1998 and 2003, but has risen more slowly than inflation
since then. Support for the physical sciences and engineering barely kept pace
with inflation during that same period. The attempt to make up lost ground is
welcome, but the nation would be better served by steady, predictable increases
in science funding at the rate of long-term GDP growth, which is on the order of
inflation plus 3 percent per year.
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发表于 2016-12-4 13:32:57