| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
Since I returned from the Peace Corps and started a career in higher education, poverty reduction has become an increasingly visible goal: pop culture icons, advertisements, political movements, and campaigns on college campuses all call for the recognition of global inequality as a first step in confronting world poverty. But the questions I asked while in Vanuatu concerning the function of education in economic development remain today. Developing countries make up 80 percent of the world's population but account for only half of all students enrolled in higher education (TFHES 2000). These statistics highlight two important areas of concern: a gap in educational access in developing countries and the need for more research to help explain the causes of that gap. The lack of research inspired me to explore the connections among poverty reduction, development, and higher education; my interest in the intersection of these three areas led me to three primary research foci: the World Bank, two developing countries, and the poverty reduction initiatives of two U.S. universities. Each of these provided a unique setting in which I was able to examine higher education and knowledge production and their utility for nation-state development.
For almost seventy years, the Bretton Woods institutions—the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the World Bank—have arguably corralled the economies of developing nations through a variety of methods under the rubric of development economics. Although some strategies and efforts have been successful, others have quite possibly contributed to the crippling of developing economies (Peet and Hartwick 1999). During the early history of the World Bank, the focus of development funding was on infrastructure: money was used primarily for building roads and power plants and for supporting the cultivation of crops that had been deemed worthy of trade by leading economists and agronomists. But during the course of the World Bank's history, a shift occurred as funding became available for programs like education and health care. More recently, a small sector of World Bank lending has been allocated specifically for higher education. Although lending for higher education in developing countries has been a subject of debate for years, during the late 1990s