The Right To Learn; Students around the world are demanding access to higher education. But it's not always easy to provide.

Byline: Vartan Gregorian (Gregorian is the president of Carnegie Corporation of New York and president emeritus of Brown University.)

In America, higher education has long been considered not a privilege but a right. The 1862 passage of the Land-Grant Colleges Act brought education to the people by establishing universities in every state, geared toward providing not only liberal-arts education but training in pedagogy, agriculture, engineering, the law, medicine and other professions. After World War II, the GI Bill further democratized access to higher education, turning it into a basic right worthy of public funding. Since 1972, millions of low-income college students have paid for their educations with more than $150 billion in federal Pell Grants.

Now that same concept of education as a right is spreading throughout the world. Even the citizens of states still in transition from their colonial legacies or emerging from war and civil strife demand that their homelands provide university-level education. Individuals increasingly recognize that their lot in life depends on their level of education and training. And states view free or affordable higher education as essential to their modernization and successful participation in the global marketplace. Many countries have tried to meet this growing demand by establishing as many institutions of higher education as possible. But creating a quality university system is easier said than done; though good schools can solve social ills from poverty to unemployment, a thousand practical problems and policy constraints stand in the way of developing them.

Indeed, simply establishing a school is not the same as having the requisite personnel, equipment, material, technological know-how and finances to sustain it. In developing nations, there may be enough political will for equal opportunity in higher education, but not enough resources for excellence. There are other challenges as well: in developing parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America, some of the best universities are under pressure to admit students from across the continent, in part--as in the United States--to increase their prestige and revenue. Often, this provokes debate within the university and the society at large about whether a nation should reserve its limited educational resources for its own population, or welcome students from across the region in the hope of promoting solidarity with neighboring states.

Some have turned to "virtual universities" or distance learning to help solve the problem. Widespread access to the Internet has made this feasible. But it also raises a number of concerns: to what extent, for example, does personal interaction with teachers matter? How much does mixing with other students contribute to an understanding of different ethnic groups, races and ideologies? What about the whole environment created by being part of a learning community over the course of four years?

A first-rate faculty is key to building a successful university. But strapped for cash, time and expertise, many institutions simply import visiting professors or rely on part-time graduate students to teach. Such hires usually remain outsiders among the university community, receive few benefits and are often neither adequately trained nor highly skilled. The opposite extreme--hiring academic "stars" in order to gain prestige but then leaving empty the coffers needed to hire young, high-quality professors--is also a recipe for institutional weakness. Ironically, universities suffer further when governments, along with local and international corporations, raid their best and brightest teachers.

In many ...