The world is in the midst of a great brain race, a global quest by nations to attract the best and brightest minds. The reason? There is now broad-based acknowledgment that higher education is at the heart of a nation's competitiveness. Colleges and universities are themselves economic drivers. More than that, they often produce the new knowledge that is at the heart of the innovations that drive the global economy, and produce the next generation of workers and leaders who will create the companies needed to take advantage of innovations and attract workers.

Many developed nations, mostly in the West, have well-established higher education systems. These higher education systems emerged over decades, if not centuries, which puts many developing nations at a significant disadvantage to compete in an economic era driven by innovation. These countries do not have the time necessary to create a higher education system in the same way—i.e., by waiting years to develop the academic capital to compete with the established leaders. So, while investing in their own systems of higher education, they have also been sending their students abroad to be educated in countries with leading higher education systems, recruiting faculty members educated in those systems to teach locally, and/or developing partnerships between their institutions and leading institutions in other nations.