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Brendan O'Malley

NOT SO LONG AGO if you saw four girls lolling down the street, they would be hugging, laughing and leaning into each other to swap gossip.

Today they are more likely to be walking side by side, with eyes down texting or a cell phone to their ear, talking to someone else.

Welcome to Generation C, as Colin Gilligan, emeritus professor in marketing at Sheffield Hallam University, calls them, and take a closer look if you are a university recruitment officer because they are the future and the future is a very uncertain place.

The problem for universities today, Professor Gilligan told the Going Global2 conference, attended by more than 600 representatives of international higher education in Edinburgh, Scotland, last week, was that they were competing for the best brains worldwide but the youngsters they sought now held all the cards.

Unlike the baby boomers (1961-81) or the MTV generation (1975-85), this generation was exposed to ubiquitous commerce, 24 hours a day and interaction and communication all the time, everywhere.

They were picky as  nobody was before them, he said, because they had to be. The C in Generation C stood for content and they had it coming out of their ears.

Professor Gilligan told the conference that when it came to choosing which country - never mind which university, department or course - they had an unprecedented and growing choice.

According to Lord Kinnock, chair of the British Council, if they want to study abroad they no longer had to settle for the old favourites, the US, Britain or Australia.

He said Malaysia, Singapore and China were increasingly successful in attracting international students. France, Germany, the Netherlands and the Nordic countries were significantly expanding their programmes, even those taught in  English.

'When that's happening in France we can begin to guess the seriousness attached to this strategy,' he said, alluding to traditional Gallic disdain for English.

With the additional rapid expansion of university places in countries such as  China, India and Pakistan - China now has more tertiary students than the US, with India coming up fast - students were beginning to question whether they needed to spend three years abroad.

'This is a new marketing arena,' Professor Gilligan told the British Council-organised conference, the second in three years on the fast-growing international market in higher education. The new consumers were far more demanding and discerning about governments, business and big brands.  'These days anyone who talks about brand loyalty is a fool or a charlatan,' he  said. 'What we have now is brand promiscuity.'

Britain has already recognised the changing climate, with institutions increasingly forging research partnerships, expanding student and lecturer exchange programmes, running joint courses in overseas universities and setting up overseas campuses such as  the University of Nottingham, Ningbo Zhejiang province, where students can obtain a British degree at a fraction of the living cost - #2,000 (HK$30,280) a year in China compared with #7,500 in the UK.

With UK institutions relying on taking 10 to 15 per cent of their students from abroad, they are having to work hard to maintain their reputations for high quality research - any ranking of the world's top 50 universities is dominated by the US and England - and the quality of experience they offer.

But Heather Forland, head of international development at Kingston University warned that for many international students 'the reality does not match the rhetoric'. They suffered from 'learning shock' because too few institutions were adapting their curriculums to accommodate  their overseas visitors.

It was a common complaint, too, among the Hong Kong delegation that British and Australian universities were  too narrowly focused on the numbers of students they could  bring in and failed to coax sufficient  of their own to go overseas.

Professor Paul Morris, president of the Hong Kong Institute of Education, said: 'It's fairly one-way traffic from the major English speaking countries. About 7,000 students from Australia are going out and 200,000 are going in. It's very stark.'

And Professor John Spinks, senior adviser to the vice-chancellor at Hong Kong university, said: 'We have a lot of difficulty getting large numbers of UK students to come on exchange but in Germany there is a lot of interest in coming out to Hong Kong and China to learn the language.' Internationalism was relatively new to Hong Kong. Before 1997, institutions weren't allowed to take students from anywhere, not even the mainland. Now the collective aim was to market Hong Kong as an education hub for South-east Asia. So far the interest had come mainly from the mainland.

'For the past three to five years everyone on the mainland has wanted to go to Hong Kong universities,' Professor Spinks said. 'Of our 3,000 non-Hong Kong students they make up half. But students in Europe and North America are not that familiar with Hong Kong.'

International partnerships are taking off. Hong Kong Polytechnic University, whose civil and structural engineering department was ranked first in the world for research in 2003-5, now has 500 partner institutions in 35 countries.

Closing the conference, Alan Gilbert, president and vice-chancellor of Manchester University - and previously vice-chancellor of Melbourne University - said the future would see not quite the flat world predicted by Thomas Friedman, a vast interconnected global social landscape of people collaborating in real time across the planet using computers, e-mail, fibre optic networks, teleconferencing and new  software.

Rather it would be dotted  with  world-class universities attracting the world's best brains. 'The reality is the world dominated by spikes of outstanding economic activity in places like Boston, Silicon Valley, Shanghai, Singapore, Bangalore, New York and London with world class universities at their core,' he said.

The tides of economic opportunity were moving in favour of the huge and growing markets of Asia. First Japan now more recently China and India had begun reinventing the rules of the game.

'Obsessed with the development of world competitive education and cutting edge technological capability, they are closing the gap with even the most sophisticated western economies in relation to skills, knowledge and innovation,' Professor Gilbert said.

The universities played  a key  role in producing graduates who were 'wonderfully prepared knowledge workers, researchers, innovators and corporate leaders but they also have a responsibility to develop tolerant liberal-minded human beings ready to be civil-minded citizens on a global scale'.

The repeated visionary message in  Edinburgh  was that the seeds of a civilised collaborative world could  be forged in the research partnerships and exchanges of learners and lecturers in the campuses of Europe, America and Asia.

But in reality each institution is amassing a bank of international partnership agreements to attract as many of the best brains  as they can, in the hope of securing for themselves  in one of the spikes of excellence.

Where this will leave the vast numbers of rural and urban poor in the developed world, particularly Africa, was barely addressed. For the poorer countries to achieve developed status, which the Malaysians suggested required a 40 percentage participation rate in higher education, an estimated 170 million new students will be needed.

In the meantime, faced with an ever expanding list of competitors,  institutions will have to adapt their marketing strategies to attract the best and the brightest in an era of ever more discerning youth and seal their place in the international rankings.

As Professor Gilligan warned, there will be 4 billion broadband subscribers by 2015 which  will change marketing to the generation used to getting a free pizza delivered every time they play Everquest II.

Faced with myriad choices, they may well resort to online recommendations, as they do on Trip Advisor, the tell-it-as-it-really-is travel website.

Don't be surprised if in future, the greatest influences on university choice are the opinions of  students posting  on the web photos of  their university.  'We have to recognise that marketing over the next few years is going to change dramatically and a radical rethink will be needed,' Professor Gilligan said. 'At the moment we are just playing around in the margins.'

www.britishcouncil.org/goingglobal2.htm



Generation C report card on universities: 'Must improve'