University

The dilemma facing higher education worsened through the 1980s and 1990s due to a massive south-north intellectual migration flow. The movement illustrates in itself the role higher education plays in keeping up the tight and imbalanced links initiated in the colonial era.

Alongside the development of local elitist systems of higher education, and in reaction to the growing attractiveness of North American institutions among local "educated elites," colonial powers were keen to encourage the most promising graduates of secondary schools to further develop their training in the home institutions. This fact, added to the flow of students migrating as a result of the higher education Malthusianism applied in the colonies, constituted the basis of a steady south-north study migration flow, which in many cases resulted in a "brain drain." Leaning on family networks or supported by external donors, and fostered by the ever-increasing economic gap between industrialized and developing countries, the flow was barely affected by the development of university education in newly independent countries. On the contrary, with local curricula largely untouched, postcolonial higher education offered excellent basic training to candidates for postgraduate programs in the developed world. This diversion of funding opportunities affected in return the quality of higher education in the developing countries. The earlier perspective of encouraging students from abroad to study in the United Kingdom or France as a form of colonial or postcolonial aid and encouragement of trade (in goods or ideas) was transformed; education came to be seen more as a directly saleable commodity. The concomitant abandonment of scholarship policies, which primarily affected students from low-income countries, impacted markedly on the origin of international students in host countries. However, as shown in Table 2, postcolonial study migration routes continued to reflect strong economic, cultural, and linguistic ties with the former home institutions, except where the United States and Australia (notably in Asia) took over leadership in the provision of higher education services.