Speaking at an International Monetary Fund summit last year, Larry Summers, the former US secretary of the Treasury and one-time president of Harvard University, discussed concerns about the way global trade was fragmenting, with different blocs emerging in a post-globalisation era.
“Even more troubling”, he said, “is that there’s a growing sense that ours may not be the best fragment to be associated with. Someone from a developing country said to me, ‘What we get from China is an airport; what we get from the US is a lecture.’”
He went on to warn that while it might not be seen as an immediate priority, if the financial system set up after the Second World War was failing, the implications for the West were enormous.
“If the Bretton Woods system is not delivering strongly around the world, there are going to be serious challenges and proposed alternatives,” he predicted.
While Summers was talking about financial systems, there are parallels to be drawn in another area that has for decades played a significant role in international relations and Western soft power.
Higher education, of course, is selling lectures – and while they might not be as sought after as airports, the flow of students from developing countries to Western universities has long been seen as significant in terms of global understanding and good relations between nations.
It is a difficult thing to prove or to quantify, although the UK’s Higher Education Policy Institute has sought to do so by publishing an annual list of world leaders who studied overseas, with the US (65 in 2023) and the UK (58) the most popular destinations.
But even if we accept the basic premise – that studying in a country will lead to enthusiasm for it later in life, including in high office – the point raised by Summers poses another question.
What if the dominance of Western universities as the institutions where internationally mobile students aspire to spend several years of their life and large sums of money is no longer a given?
There are plenty of signs that this is not a hypothetical question in 2024.
Western governments are responding to fraught domestic politics by squeezing international student “migration”, as many insist on classifying it, even when this is to the detriment of their universities and the tuition fee cross-subsidy that supports both the research base and domestic provision.
This is a live issue in the UK at present, but also in other Western countries that have built their university systems on overseas student fees – Canada announced a crackdown last week, while Australia has reduced the generosity of its post-study work visa in recent months.
Meanwhile, just as China has rolled out airports and other infrastructure projects across vast swathes of the developing world through its Belt and Road Initiative, so sustained investment in its universities and growing efforts to market them to students from other countries continue apace.
We explore these issues in our cover story, talking to Joseph Nye, the American political scientist who popularised the concept of soft power in the 1980s, who identifies higher education exports as a factor in the US and the UK “punching above their weight” geopolitically over many decades.
Nye also cautions that soft power has its limits – and that the influence attached to international education carries weight only if graduates return home feeling positive about their experience.
This is worth heeding. In many Western countries, not only is the political rhetoric about overseas students increasingly unwelcoming, but the course costs are spiralling into price-gouging territory.
Our feature also includes a warning from Aurel Braun, professor of international relations at the University of Toronto, that soft power works only in a complementary sense.
“Soft power is like the cream in the coffee,” he explains. “It’s very nice, and it adds flavour, but you need hard power as well because without that you don’t have any impact.”
For Western countries that have perhaps taken their comparative advantages in both arenas for granted, the hard truth in 2024 might be that both are under threat.
Just as Summers warned of the financial system, the risk is that the West allows its higher education advantage to slip away, failing to recognise this as a priority until it is too late.
