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Universities Branch Out From their student bodies to their research practices, universities are becoming more global.

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问题                                        Universities Branch Out
    From their student bodies to their research practices, universities are becoming more global.
                                                                               By Richard Levin
    As never before in their long history, universities have become instruments of national competition as well as instruments of peace. They are the locus of the scientific discoveries that move economies forward, and the primary means of educating the talent required to obtain and maintain competitive advantage. But at the same time, the opening of national borders to the flow of goods, services, information and especially people has made universities a powerful force for global integration, mutual understanding and geopolitical stability.
    In response to the same forces that have propelled the world economy, universities have become more self-consciously global: seeking students from around the world who represent the entire spectrum of cultures and values, sending their own students abroad to prepare them for global careers, offering courses of study that address the challenges of an interconnected world and collaborative research programs to advance science for the benefit of all humanity.
    Of the forces shaping higher education none is more sweeping than the movement across borders. Over the past three decades the number of students leaving home each year to study abroad has grown at an annual rate of 3.9 percent, from 800,000 in 1975 to 2.5 million in 2004. Most travel from one developed nation to another, but the flow from developing to developed countries is growing rapidly. The reverse flow, from developed to developing countries, is on the rise, too. Today foreign students earn 30 percent of the doctoral degrees awarded in the United States and 38 percent of those in the United Kingdom. And the number crossing borders for undergraduate study is growing as well, to 8 percent of the undergraduates at America’s Ivy League institutions and 10 percent of all undergraduates in the U.K. In the United States, 20 percent of newly hired professors in science and engineering are foreign-born, and in China the vast majority of newly hired faculty at the top research universities received their graduate education abroad.
    What are the consequences of these shifts among the highly educated? Consider this: on the night after the attacks on the World Trade Center, Jewish students at Yale (most of them American) came together with Muslim students (most of them foreign) to organize a vigil. Or this: every year the student-run Forum for American/Chinese Exchange at Stanford (FACES) organizes conferences in both China and at Stanford, bringing together students from both countries chosen to discuss Sino-U. S. relations with leading experts. The leaders of student groups promoting international collaboration are in touch with each other daily via e-mail and Skype, technologies that not only facilitate cooperative projects but also increase the likelihood of creating lifelong personal ties. The bottom line: the flow of students across national borders-- students who are disproportionately likely to become leaders in their home countries-- enables deeper mutual understanding, tolerance and global integration.
    As part of this, universities are encouraging students to spend some of their undergraduate experience in another country. In Europe, more than 140,000 students participate in the Erasmus program each year, taking courses for credit in one of 2,200 participating institutions across the continent. And in the United States, institutions are mobilizing their alumni to help place students in summer internships abroad to prepare them for global careers. Yale and Harvard have led the way, offering every undergraduate at least one international study or internship opportunity-- and providing the financial resources to make it possible. Universities are also establishing more-ambitious foreign outposts to serve students primarily from the local market rather than the parent campus. And true educational joint ventures are gaining favor, such as the 20-year-old Johns Hopkins-Nanjing program in Chinese and American Studies, the Duke Goethe executive M. B. A. program and the MIT-Singapore alliance, which offers dual graduate degrees in a variety of engineering fields.
    Globalization is also reshaping the way research is done. One new trend involves sourcing portions of a research program to another country. Yale professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Tian Xu directs a research center focused on the genetics of human disease at his alma mater, Shanghai’s Fudan University, in collaboration with faculty colleagues from both schools. The Shanghai center has 95 employees and graduate students working in a 4,300-square-meter laboratory facility. Yale faculty, postdocs and graduate students visit regularly and attend videoconference seminars with scientists from both campuses. The arrangement benefits both countries; Xu’s Yale lab is more productive, thanks to the lower costs of conducting research in China, and Chinese graduate students, postdocs and faculty get on-the-job training from a world-class scientist and his U.S. team.
    Indeed, China is intent on playing all its cards. By investing heavily in research, tripling university enrollments between 1998 and 2004, and encouraging top students to think independently, the country is self-consciously using its universities as a means to stimulate economic growth. At the same time, since Deng Xiaoping first permitted Chinese students to seek education in the West in 1978, no country has made a more deliberate effort to send its most talented students abroad for a top education --especially at the graduate level. Today, in contrast to 10 or 20 years ago when economic opportunity was limited at home, most Chinese students return after graduation-- often with an appreciation of the values of a free society and a greater understanding of the countries where they studied.
    Europe, by contrast, has lost its competitive edge. According to "The Future of European Universities: Renaissance or Decay?" a devastating recent critique by Confederation of British Industry Director General Richard Lambert and Nick Butler, Chief of Strategic Planning at British Petroleum, European governments have systematically weakened their top universities, once the pride of the world. They have invested too little in research, spread limited resources across too many institutions, expanded enrollments without increasing faculty and refused to allow universities sufficient autonomy, the report says. To flourish, they need to concentrate more resources in the hands of the strongest universities and allow them to generate revenue by charging tuition fees like their U.S. counterparts-- and awarding financial aid to those in greatest need.
    For all its success, the United States remains deeply ambivalent about sustaining the research-university model. Most politicians recognize the link between investment in science and national economic strength, but support for research funding has been fitful and sporadic rather than steady. The budget of the National Institutes of Health doubled between 1998 and 2003, but has risen more slowly than inflation since then. Support for the physical sciences and engineering barely kept pace with inflation during that same period; legislation to double these expenditures in 10 years is currently pending. The attempt to make up lost ground is welcome, but the nation would be better served by steady, predictable increases in science funding at the rate of long-term GDP growth, which is on the order of inflation plus 3 percent per year.
As a result of steady and predictable increases in science funding ______.
选项
答案the nation would be better served
解析 本题空白处问“在自然科学方面稳定的、可预测的投入对于什么有重要意义”。根据题干关键词"steady and predictable increases, science funding" 定位在文章第九段最后一句话，“通过保持与长期GDP 发展一致，在科学方面进行稳定可预测的投资增长，国家将得到更好的服务”。也就是说这样做结果会使国家得到更好的服务。因此，答案为the nation would be better served。
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