Center for Studies in Higher Education

This essay discusses past and current thinking about the globalization of higher education (from a U.S. point of view in particular) and a new model we are attempting to develop at the University of California, Berkeley. This essay begins with a brief narrative of the historical evolution of efforts to internationalize education, from the seventeenth century to the present day, before providing a schematic outline of efforts to create new models for the global university. From its earliest beginnings in the U.S. and elsewhere, higher education embodied important global dimensions. Since then, the globalization of higher education has accelerated rapidly over the last quarter century, motivated by a quest for additional revenues (especially in the case of Anglophone universities), a desire for greater international relevance and hence prestige (for all universities, but especially in the case of European and Asian universities), and a desire to provide a foundation for a knowledge economy (especially in the case of Asian universities)