September-October 2009

European Competition
In their article on the global talent pool (“Whither the Global Talent Pool?,” Change, July/August 2009), John Douglass and Richard Edelstein address an important issue. Global competition for talent has increased during the last decade, as the ongoing process of world-wide economic integration has led to a growing interconnectedness of markets, an increased mobility of capital and labor, and a stronger focus on knowledge as the crucial production factor. The creation, dissemination, and application of knowledge are regarded as critical to the international competitiveness of cities, regions, nations, and even whole continents. Attracting knowledge talent has become a key strategic objective in many nations’ innovation policies.

In its so-called “Lisbon Strategy” (2000), the European Union formulated its ambition to become “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth, with more and better jobs, and greater social cohesion.” Higher education and research form important aspects of this strategy, and several targets were set. A crucial one was an increase of at least 15 percent in the number of tertiary graduates in mathematics, science, and technology by 2010, a target that was reached in 2005.

The EU also wants to increase its world share of foreign students, and so far it has been successful. From 2000 to 2006, the percentage of foreign students in the EU27 countries increased from 5 to 8.9 percent. The number of students from China grew six-fold, from fewer than 20,000 in 2000 to 113,000 in 2006, while the number of students from India quintupled. During the same period the percentage of foreign students in the US decreased from 3.6 to 3.3 percent. With an increase of 56 percent in international students between 2000 and 2006, the EU has become a strong international player in the international talent market.

There are several explanations for this increase. One is probably the wide variety of teaching languages. Another is that students from former colonies appear to come to the EU countries with which they have cultural and historical ties and whose language they speak. But probably the most important is the strategic European policy framework developed during the last decade. Both the ten-year-old, Europe-wide Bologna Process (with 46 nations now participating) and the EU27 Lisbon Strategy have recreated a European higher education model which increasingly is presented as an alternative to the well-established and still highly attractive US model. During the years to come, the EU intends to expand its model via partnerships with third countries, with a “brain-circulation” rather than a “brain-drain” approach and with new instruments like the “external cooperation window scheme” of the Erasmus Mundus program (2009-2013) and new multidimensional classification and ranking instruments.

In the continuing global competition for talent, the US and the EU will be the main competitors. But the US and EU higher education systems also share many values and basic principles which will allow them to jointly contribute to further global socioeconomic development..

—Frans van Vught
President, European Centre for Strategic Management of Universities
Brussels, Belgium

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