The Pursuit of Excellence

Sometime around the seventh grade, many American students are introduced to the tale of 10 blind men inspecting an elephant. When each blind man reaches different conclusions about the creature, the students are invited to consider whether truth is absolute or lies in the eye of the beholder. College professors and administrators might want to remember that fable when they take the measure of American higher education. Many of them, who tend to see only what they stand to lose, perceive the beast as wounded, suffering from the shocks of rising costs, dwindling resources and life-draining cutbacks. But foreigners, who compare America's universities with their own, often reach very different conclusions about the nature of the beast.

If sheer numbers provide any proof, America's universities and colleges are the envy of the world. For all their abiding troubles, this country's 3,500 institutions were flooded with 407,530 students from 193 different countries last year. Asia led the way with 39,600 students from China and 36,610 from Japan, followed by India and Canada. Many of the foreigners, who entered graduate and undergraduate programs in roughly equal numbers, felt they had to go abroad to escape narrow and restrictive systems at home. They came in search of academic excellence certainly, but they also came looking for freedom, diversity and the cachet that an American degree continues to provide.

Some students come simply because they are shut out of the system at home. Most European and Asian universities provide an elite service to a small and privileged clientele. While fully 60% of all U.S. high school graduates attend college at some point in their life, just 30% of the comparable German population, 28% of the French, 20% of the British and 37% of the Japanese proceed beyond high school. German students who survive the Abitur or Britons who pass their A levels may still not qualify for a top university at home, but find American universities far more welcoming. Some U.S. schools acknowledge the rigor of European secondary training and will give up to a year's credit to foreigners who have passed their high school exams.

"The egalitarian conception that everyone has a right to an education appropriate to his potential is a highly democratic and compassionate standard," says Marvin Bressler, professor of sociology and education specialist at Princeton University. True, not all U.S. collegians can match the performance of their foreign counterparts, but American institutions do offer students from rich and poor families alike the chance to realize their full potential. "America educates so many more people at university that one can't expect all those who go to be either as well informed or intelligent as the much narrower band who go to English universities," says Briton Christopher Ricks, professor of English at Boston University. Having instructed at Cambridge, Ricks knows that teaching T.S. Eliot to British undergraduates is an easier task. Yet he finds teaching at B.U. very rewarding. "I'm not against elitism," he says. "But I happen to like having people who are more eager to learn."