Center for Studies in Higher Education

During the 2009-10 academic year international students generated more than $18.8 billion in net income into the US economy. California alone had nearly 100,000 international students with an economic impact of nearly $3.0 billion. In this paper, we outline a strategy for the San Francisco/Bay Area to double the number of international students enrolled in local colleges and universities in ten years or less, generating a total direct economic impact of an additional $1 billion a year into the regional economy. The US retains a huge market advantage for attracting foreign students. Within the US, the San Francisco/Bay Area is particularly attractive and could prevail as an extraordinary global talent magnet, if only policymakers and higher education leaders better understood this and formulated strategies to tap the global demand for higher education. Ultimately, all globalism is local. We propose that the San Francisco/Bay Area, a region with a group of stellar universities and colleges, should re-imagine itself as a Global Higher Education Hub to meet national and regional economic needs, as well as the thirst of a growing world population for high-quality tertiary education. Other parts of the world have already developed their version of the higher education hub idea. The major difference in our proposed Californian version is that foreign competitors seek to attract foreign universities to help build enrollment and program capacity at home, and are funded almost solely by significant government subsidies. Our model builds capacity, but is focused on attracting the world’s talent and generating additional income to existing public and private colleges and universities. Doubling international enrollment from 30,000 to 60,000 students in ten years or less will require expanding regional enrollment capacity as part of a strategy to ensure access to native students, and as part of a scheme to attract a new generation of faculty and researchers to the Bay Area and California. International students would need to pay higher then the full cost of their education, helping to subsidize domestic students and college and university programs. The result would be a San Francisco/Bay Area Global Higher Education Hub – a self-reinforcing knowledge ecosystem that is internationally attractive,