In continuation of the previous post, certain facts may be marshalled to confirm the hypothesis concerning higher education and development. The United States, as a superpower and a super economy, historically deployed its power, knowledge systems, and institutional mechanisms to dominate global value chains, extracting resources, talent, and consumables from across the world, thereby securing relatively high-end and high-paying employment for its own citizens. This global positioning made a high Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education both feasible and functionally relevant, as advanced skills and credentials were required to occupy superior locations in the international division of labour. As this leverage now weakens, the United States appears to be attempting to reclaim labour-intensive, low-paying, and low-skilled jobs for its domestic workforce, a shift visible in crackdowns on immigration and the resort to protectionist trade measures such as tariffs. Similar tendencies are observable across other developed economies. In such a scenario, these countries would neither require nor be able to sustain higher education systems at the present scale, lending credence to the argument that high GER is more a corollary of development than its cause. Instead, higher education in particular, and schooling in general, is increasingly likely to be reorganised as an industry within a competitive global marketplace. A further supporting pattern is that once a country loses its global advantage, its institutions begin to lose their strength. Institutions that were originally instrumental in constructing mechanisms of power and wealth gradually turn into custodians of a settled order, but when that order fractures, these institutions face redundancy and decline. It is in this context that New York, long regarded as the epitome of capitalism and Americanism, now appears to be sliding into the grips of what may be described as third-worldism, symbolising a deeper institutional and structural erosion that also calls into question the sustainability of mass higher education in declining hegemonic economies.
Niraj Kumar Jha
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