When American universities and colleges underwent their great post-war expansion, most historians agree the motivation was not entirely educational. Millions of young, able-bodied American males were returning from the battlefields of Europe and East Asia. They expected to find jobs waiting for them. And a traditional post-war economic slump could have resulted in serious political trouble, verging on national chaos.
By making the college experience available to veterans whose parents had seldom moved beyond high school, the United States made intelligent use of its higher education system to further its general well-being. In the process, of course, it produced a generation of college graduates, all of whom had been exposed to the histories, cultures, literatures and artistic conventions of other nations and other parts of the world, into which their post-college employers were just beginning to expand.
Graduates like these proceeded to staff our businesses, in other words, just as the latter began their expansion into the international marketplace. In particular, they took part in the enormous effort represented by the Marshall Plan – the effort to rebuild European industries and European financial structures so that Europeans could once again become America’s best customers. The success of the Marshall Plan, in turn, set the pace for other, similar efforts aimed at Asia and the Middle East. And within a few years, the kind of global thinking that resulted from these efforts was being taught in our nation’s business schools.
For many of those who then worked in higher education, these dramatic events were a mixed blessing. Yes, it was great that the G.I. Bill of Rights was keeping classrooms full and paychecks stable. But so much of higher education in the 20th century had gotten used to resisting mass culture. College, those who staffed our colleges had long proclaimed, was where you went to get serious about Western history and the Western humanistic tradition. Wouldn’t our colleges’ role as a refuge and an alternative become diluted once they were full of ordinary high school graduates? Wouldn’t average guys and average girls, as they became college students, turn our colleges into increasingly average places?
What these worriers didn’t often see, however, was that higher education had begun its long romance with Planet Earth, a relationship with many twists and turns. Even as many Americans were learning to play the status games of the college crowd – whose kid got into Harvard as opposed to whose kid was attending a state college – the expansion of our community college system revealed a new truth to the American people: that higher education could make a direct impact on local and regional economies of the United States, and ultimately on the national economy, too.
Corporations, when they thought about opening a new factory or a new regional center, were careful to inquire about the educational picture in the proposed location. A reliable flow of new workers – from assembly-line employees to middle managers – would eliminate the need for costly recruitment campaigns, as well as the need to move higher-level employees back and forth across the North American continent.
By the 1970s and the 1980s, few disputed that our college and university system had become fully integrated with the American economy as a whole. And perhaps this should have prepared them for what is now shaping up as the higher education role of the 21st century: higher education as the very apex of the competitive struggle among nations, among world regions and among the vast multitudes of global investors.
One of the things I keep discovering in my international travels is that the education establishments of other countries keep a very close watch on our own higher-education practices. They sense a close connection between those practices and the triumphs of the American economy, which so often dominates the planetary economy we have learned to take for granted. American ideals of capitalist competition and free enterprise, they sense, assisted by a pervasive network of two-year colleges, four-year colleges and universities, help to explain why Americans can so easily buy into the other national economies, or can simply brush aside attempts, in other nations, to compete with their own products and services.
And educated foreigners can also learn lessons from what happens when, occasionally, another country actually outstrips America in the development of high technology. The aircraft industries of the European Union are experienced by many Americans – even those who work in other industries altogether – as a personal challenge of sorts. That a Scandinavian country should produce better cellular-phone technology than its American competitors is experienced, in this country, the way a nursery tune would be experienced if it were introduced into The Star-Spangled Banner. No wonder even average Americans are so conscious of the need to keep their nation internationally competitive.
Of all habits, the one that’s easiest to become addicted to is the habit of global domination. In this case, however, all of the best-known American virtues – those summed up in our Bill of Rights – are seen as becoming operative, in the world of global business competition, only through the role played by our higher-education system. The latter is what gives American business its sense of self-confidence, the audience represented by other nations has concluded. An American college or university is, they believe, an institution at the service of America’s unlimited business ambitions.
As we prepare for the 21st century, therefore, we are preparing for a century in which we won’t be just GW graduates or GW faculty members or GW administrators. We will be at the very center of our planet’s economic system, whose heavyweights will be the countries and the global regions that have most successfully integrated their colleges and universities with their economies. The prospect is exhilarating in many ways. But it will inevitably disappoint those who continue to think of higher education as an escape from the crude world where people earn their livings by frequent selling and more occasional buying!
The writer is president of The George Washington University and professor of public administration
