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This theme recurs in the literature on international education, especially in my reading about the World Bank through the years. For a period of time in its history, the World Bank was considered to have negatively impacted higher education in developing countries by requiring countries to disinvest public funds for higher education. However, primary source citations regarding the impact of this required disinvestment are rare. A core component of this account was the broad-based structural adjustment program (SAP) established for improving economic growth in developing countries. The SAPs were development projects that comprised a mixture of privatization, occasional currency devaluation, increases in exports, and reductions in public expenditures. Education was considered a public expenditure that was prone to cuts, resulting in decisions on which sectors (primary, secondary, or higher education) would receive the heaviest cuts. More often than not, higher education suffered the greatest loss as a result of conclusions drawn by World Bank economists who had conducted individual-rate-of-return analyses on the value of an education. As it turns out, the expensive nature of higher education and the marginal returns on lifetime earnings made higher education the lowest priority. In light of these facts, my objective in conducting this study was to understand both what the World Bank itself sees as its purpose, and how people impacted by the institution's policies understand that purpose and its unintended consequences.
The first research setting for this study was the suit-and-tie culture of Washington, DC, home of the World Bank headquarters, where I encountered World Bank culture in everything from the building structures and the artwork in the lobbies to the rhetorical consistencies—and inconsistencies—among the officials I interviewed. When I asked World Bank officials about the purpose of their institution, they typically gave a consistent response: “To reduce poverty with passion and professionalism.” It was interesting to listen to these officials describe their work using that phrase because one of my goals was to discover links between higher education and poverty reduction. However, I sensed reluctance to criticize the World Bank from the employees whom I interviewed (during my study, which took place in 2007), particularly with respect to