The globalization of knowledge
AS SOMEONE born, raised, and educated in Yugoslavia (now Serbia), I was fortunate to be in both a family and educational environment that fostered and encouraged my thirst for knowledge-based solutions -- whether academic, geographical, political, or interpersonal.
Since then, the progress that has been made in establishing a worldwide sharing of learning and ideas has been staggering. Yet, to move this further toward the day when people of every nationality and status can benefit most from the creativity and ideas of others, we need to expand the vision in the United States and sharpen the focus, eliminate unnecessary roadblocks, and buttress theory with real-world practicality.
As a start, leading universities, business schools, research hospitals, and technology institutes should share more of themselves with each other. Students not only benefit from collaborative efforts, but collaboration also opens additional study options abroad for them.
This expanded knowledge goes with them, to such job-based programs as architecture, biomedical engineering, or computer sciences in places from Berlin to Rome to Waterford. Wentworth Institute has initiatives in China and Venezuela, rapidly developing countries with needs for expertise in construction management, industrial design, civil/mechanical/electrical engineering, and other like disciplines. The learning-based combination of rigorous theory and practical, hands-on US education can build not only infrastructure but also long-term friendships and cooperation.
To bring this about successfully, the academic world needs both help from industry and outreach to the young. The National Academy of Engineering has picked up this mantle with an ambitious workshop that will attempt to delineate between negative offshore job loss and the opportunities this may provide for increasing US productivity here and abroad, improving US capacity for creating high-skill jobs and encouraging economic growth. What educators must do is fill the pipeline, by encouraging students to immerse themselves in technology.
A bureaucratic barrier that must be modified is the student visa problem. Obviously 9/11 and the resulting increased security needs altered the landscape. Student visas dropped 20 percent in 2002 alone; at Wentworth the population of international students has fallen 50 percent since 2001. The Institute for International Education attributes this to ''real and perceived difficulties in obtaining student visas. . . and perceptions abroad that it is more difficult for international students to come to the United States."
The barrier is higher for prospective incoming students from middle-class families -- and also from places where US relationships are not fully established. China is a prime example; and both of these hurdles provide irony. First, working-class students from abroad who really want to learn are just those the United States should be trying to import. Second, the heaviest-populated country in the world is just where educational globalization can make its biggest inroads and where societal immersion is most critical.
Political pressure from the educational community, media, business, and leaders of political parties is necessary. We can find a way to keep America secure and benefit from exporting and importing knowledge.
The more students that US schools send abroad, the more programs are established in countries important to the United States and to the world's long-term growth and peace. Likewise, the more students from these countries that study and work in the United States, the better the chance for mutually beneficial and continuing economic growth . . . and the stability this provides.
Paul Grogan, CEO of the Boston Foundation, summed it up succinctly by saying that the United States needs to develop and nurture its human capital ''to succeed in a competitive global environment that values knowledge and ideas above everything else."
Zorica Pantic will be installed today as president of Wentworth Institute of Technology. 
