Opening Statement By Research and Science Education Subcommittee Chair Brian Baird

I want to welcome everyone to this morning’s hearing on the globalization of American universities and its impact on national competitiveness. I want to offer welcomes to our distinguished witnesses – all leaders and experts on the emerging trend of university globalization.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts on the globalization of universities and its implications for America’s competitiveness.

Corporations have been globalizing for decades. And we know its effects on U.S. competitiveness are complex, including positives such as lower prices for consumers as well as negatives such as job and wage loss for some American workers. But we know very little about how university globalization will impact America’s competitiveness.

America’s higher education system is a principal source of America’s pre-eminence in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. The Economist reports that U.S. higher education is the best in the world, home to seventeen of the top twenty universities and 70 percent of the world’s Nobel prize-winners. The National Science Board reports that American academics produce 30 percent of the world’s science and engineering articles.

But offshoring is re-shaping how and where STEM work is done. As a result, international competition has shifted increasingly to the individual worker level. Multi-national companies are responding to international competition by using more workers in lower-cost countries. Those companies’ American workforce now competes against workers in low cost countries like China and India.

American workers must respond by either increasing their productivity or lowering their wages. Obviously, the only acceptable solution is for our workers to increase their productivity. But this is becoming more difficult as a larger share of jobs become vulnerable to offshoring. And many of our workers’ traditional advantages - better infrastructure, better tools and technologies, and proximity to the largest consumer market - are being eroded. Therefore, our higher education system will become an even more critical factor in helping American workers differentiate themselves from workers in low cost countries.

At the same time American universities are beginning to globalize in new ways. With many more jobs requiring international work teams, universities are preparing their STEM students by providing more international experience through study abroad and other cross-border collaborations. And universities are modifying their STEM curricula to better prepare their students for the jobs that will stay in America.

In some respects American universities have been global for many years. They have attracted large numbers of foreign students, particularly in STEM fields at the graduate level. But offshoring is giving high quality foreign students outstanding job opportunities in their home countries. This may make it less likely that foreign students will stay in the U.S. after graduation, and may make it less desirable to come to the U.S. to study in the first place. So, American universities are taking their education to foreign students by building campuses and offering STEM degree programs in other countries.

We look forward to hearing what our witnesses have to say about the trends, motivations, and consequences of the globalization of universities on the U.S. science and engineering enterprise, its workforce, and America’s competitiveness.