China, Europe and the Netherlands: Opportunity Is Knocking at Our Doors

060 
  Apr. 2015
global university must provide state of the art facilities 
for its faculty. I would argue that it should be independ-
ent and have excellent leadership and governance. That 
leadership must promote the international agenda and 
have a vision that encompasses it.
Innovative global research
The pursuit of innovative global research is the abso-
lutely prime characteristic and without it, a university 
cannot claim to be global. What is clear is that global 
research is not just more “connectivity”; i.e. putting 
people together in different ways, maximizing effective 
use of logistics, video seminar series and summer insti-
tutes. All these are good in themselves and may lead to 
new ways of thinking and collaborating but they are not 
“global” characteristics. The global part of this comes in 
the marshalling of these universities’ huge intellectual 
and logistical resources to address global problems and 
questions in new ways.
The size of the endeavor, the size and centrality of 
the questions and the multiplicity of partners are the 
crucial factors here. This means asking academic staff 
to think in new ways, asking them look out of the rut 
and see different horizons. This is not intellectually 
easy; most of us are much more comfortable with 
reductionist science. It is fiercely difficult to identify, 
never mind pose, the central integrating question. The 
“connectivity” benefits that I have described above will 
be an essential mechanism for identifying and posing 
these questions but it is essential that “connectivity” 
should be identified for that purpose and not just seen 
as a good in its own right.
An international curriculum and global distribution of 
education
Our students will become global citizens in a way 
that people of my generation would never have consid-
ered. The curricula we teach should reflect that. I don’t 
mean that we should be teaching internationalization 
as a module, more that we should be reviewing our ba-
sic curricula in all our subjects and asking whether they 
are structured and taught in a way which reflects the 
global nature of our world. 
A global university will have global distribution of its 
educational material and programs. Up until recently, 
this meant investment in platforms and new forms of 
pedagogy that proved to be expensive and didn’t neces-
sarily succeed. However the arrival of MOOCs (Massive 
Open Online Courses) and their support by established 
distance learning providers has changed all that. I chair 
the Partner Advisory Board for FutureLearn which 
is the company spun out of the Open University to 
Public Policy 
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Apr. 2015 
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WWW.BOAOREVIEW.COM
support MOOCs. Their impact is enormous. Future-
Learn is moving towards 1 million registrations on its 
MOOCs. Its largest registration is over 140,000. 
Not only are MOOCs giving universities the oppor-
tunity to advertise excellence but they are also, in the 
hands of the correct supporting company, a low risk 
way for a university to enter the global distributed 
learning sector. This will certainly be one way of mod-
ern pedagogy, so a global university should be explor-
ing it.
International student and staff
It is inconceivable that a global university won’t have 
a substantial number of international students from 
diverse backgrounds. At Bristol, 18% of our students 
come from overseas and if you add in EU students, that 
reaches nearly 30% from over 100 counties. I would 
argue that represents a truly global student body
A global university will have faculty from all over 
the world, not including returning expatriates. The free 
movement of labor in the EU has really helped UK uni-
versities to attract talented faculty from the European 
continent. 
Impacting global issues and policy formulation
Academic staff of a global university will advise glob-
al institutions on policy formulation in global issues, 
for example advising the United Nations about solu-
tions to global poverty or WHO about AIDS and its 
management in the Third World.
Close interactions with global business
Chief executives and senior managers in global 
businesses will naturally interact and collaborate with 
organizations that they consider to be punching at the 
same weight as they are.
Visitors
A colleague recently said that he had worked at 
three universities and what differentiated one from 
the others was the frequency and diversity of other ac-
ademics from outside the UK visiting the department 
and the university. In other words, you have what oth-
er people in the globe want to see. 
Some may agree with these definitions and others 
disagree but they are a starting point for discussion. 
As I wrote earlier, much remains unchanged over 12 
years. One final thought. There are now four major 
global league tables. Only 49 universities are in the 
top 100 in all four and only 70 in three out of the four. 
Are those 49 or even those 70 the only truly global 
universities?
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062 
  Apr. 2015
F
or decades, Mexico has been the single great-
est source of immigrants to the United States. 
Indeed, of the approximately 40 million for-
eign-born in the United States, nearly three in ten are 
from Mexico.
While a great deal of attention has been given to this 
population, there has been less attention to those who 
return to Mexico. Such populations are considerable. 
Surveys of older persons in both countries suggest 
that, among persons 50 or older, there are about as 
many immigrants in the United States who were born 
in Mexico as there are return migrants in Mexico who 
spent at least part of their lives in the United States.
Such numbers have been growing. From the late 
1990s to the latter years of last decade, for example, 
the Pew Research Center found that the number of mi-
grants from the United States to Mexico increased from 
670,000 to 1.39 million, while the number of migrants 
from Mexico to the United States decreased from 2.94 
million to 1.37 million.
This return migration has several implications for 
Mexico and the United States, particularly for older 
populations in these two nations that lack a bilateral 
agreement for the portability and totalization of so-
cial-security contributions between them. Without 
such an agreement, Mexican workers must contribute 
at least ten years to the U.S. Social Security Adminis-
tration, or at least 25 years to a Mexican social-security 
institute (through work in the formal sector rather than 
the larger informal sector), to qualify for retirement 
benefits. Workers may not combine years of contribu-
tions to qualify.
Research we have conducted, using surveys of the 
populations at least 50 years of age in both countries, 
helps illustrate several emerging policy challenges, in-
cluding those related to income security at older ages.
More than three in four return migrants are male, 
compared to 49 percent of immigrants remaining in 
the United States and 42 percent of older Mexicans 
who never migrated. About two in three, or more, are 
Public Policy 
Going Back to Mexico: 
Access to Healthcare 
and Income Security 
in Old Age
By Emma Aguila
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