It is hard to imagine that this more pressured financial environment will not have an impact on the international mobility of students and faculties. But we can be confident that the crisis will only temporarily slow down the rate of increase in the globalization of higher education rather than reverse it. Since students will no longer feel tied to their "home" universities for financial reasons after subsidies decline, they will become more footloose.

Next year, tuition fees in the UK will increase from a little more than 3,000 a year to between 6,000 and 9,000.

The demand for tertiary education will continue to grow, in part because higher-level skills are a fundamental input to the vitality and sustainability of a knowledge-based economy, and in part because demand for higher education is income elastic. In other words, as we get richer, demand grows faster than growth in incomes.

The major emerging economies are large and growing very fast. But they are still relatively poor. Together, China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan and Russia account for half of the world's population, but according to the AT Kearney index of globalization, none of them features in the world's top 40 most globalized economies. Demand for higher education will grow especially strongly in these and many other emerging economies. Although countries like China are investing heavily in higher education - an additional 39 billion yuan ($5.93 billion) will be poured into the top 38 higher education institutions in four years - emerging economies will be unable to satisfy domestic demand, especially at the postgraduate level.

China is intent on becoming a knowledge-based economy as it progresses to the next stage of economic development. To catch up with the most advanced economies like the UK and the US in higher education, China will continue to encourage students to study overseas, particularly as the country's per capita income grows.

In its bid to increase its impact on the global economy, China has welcomed an increasing number of students from overseas, mostly from Africa, Latin America and other Asian countries. But in recent years, a rising number of students from the US and the European Union, too, are choosing to study in China. More than 400,000 overseas students are studying in about 200 universities in China today.

One of the key consequences of the globalization of higher education is the move by universities in developed countries to set up campuses in emerging economies, primarily Asia.

There appears to be growing interest in this mode of entry, albeit mostly on a niche rather than full- campus basis. It was reported in January that a district governor in Shanghai is in talks with Ivy League universities to attract two of the eight institutions to set up branch campuses in the city by 2015.

However lingering the effects of the financial crisis, an increasingly globalized world of higher education appears assured.

David Greenaway is vice-chancellor of the University of Nottingham, Shujie Yao is head of Nottingham's School of Contemporary Chinese Studies.

(China Daily 03/19/2011 page5)