GlobalEurope Anticipation Bulletin recently published a set of seven "anticipations about a key-field of the world's intellectual production, i.e. the value of international academic degrees," degrees "endowed with an intellectual, scientific and commercial worth acknowledged worldwide." Their conclusions are extremely sobering for American higher education:

1. In a changing world, prestigious academic degrees can also become high-risk investments.

[I]nvesting in a degree is a ten to twenty year-bet on the future, supposing that the thousands or tens of thousands Euros or Dollars invested today will generate ten or a hundred times more in revenues tomorrow.... [I]n one decade from now at most, some of today's world top academic degrees will have lost a lot of their value while people graduated from others will be heavily demanded by employers. Think of the degrees granted by those prestigious Soviet universities before 1989, whose degrees were not worth anything left in the 1990s.

2. The world of "prestigious degrees" suffers the same trends as the world altogether

On many aspects, trends within the world of "prestigious degrees" are similar to trends within the world altogether. After 1945, two super powers emerged, the United States and USSR, leading the elites from all over the world to organise their training processes around these two centres.... In the early 90s already, the entire communist academic system, centred on Moscow, was falling apart and the degrees so much appreciated only a few years before were not worth anything left on the market. Meanwhile, in just a few years time, Western Europe soon followed by the future (now new) Eastern and Central European member states, had refocused their academic exchanges on Europe, bilateral exchanges with the US thus shrinking away. In the mid-80s, nearly 90% of European students studying abroad went to the US; ten years later, in the mid 90s, this proportion had completely reversed with only 10% going to a US university and 90% going to another European country's university.

3. The US academic leadership lived its last years in the 90s: flows of foreign student coming to the US have been collapsing for 5 years already while they have progressed on a global level

Simultaneously, this dominant "foreign" orientation of large US universities, whose academic staff and students were less and less American, corresponded to a significant deterioration of the US educational system altogether.... [At the same time, the] development of a global European academic system centred on the strong inter-academic networks born from Erasmus resulted in a proliferation of partnerships between EU establishments and universities from other continents... Meanwhile Asia is becoming a prominent academic destination due to the growing importance of this continent on a global scale....

These statistical tendencies convey an important mid-term consequence in terms of the professional "value" of a degrees, i.e. "alumni networks" ; indeed they show that on a global scale, tomorrow's main "alumni networks" are being built outside the US (while it was the contrary in the past few decades). American students themselves tend to cross the Atlantic in large numbers in the opposite direction (compared to the years 1950-2000) (18).

Student visas to the US., 1998-2006: Number of student visas for the US between 1998 and 2006 (decrease: light green to dark green / increase: light blue to dark blue). Sources: Educationsector.org / US Department of State. (http://www.leap2020.eu/Value-of-international-academic-degrees-How-

4. The global systemic crisis involves a profound modification in future international elites' training requirements

These trends will keep on strengthening because the weakening of the US academic fabric is structural. It relates to the US loss in attractiveness in general and to the country's impoverishment, but it also relates to structural trends rooted in the emergence of a world different from the one created after 1945 whose global elites were trained by US universities all along the last six decades.

5. Eurasia (including Russia) at the heart of the world's academic excellence in the coming two decades

[T]oday's heavy trends (at least for another twenty years) put Europe and Asia at the centre of all upcoming scientific, technological and cultural tendencies. In the past twenty years, Europe gradually emerged as a "master" of trans-national networking and a champion of intercultural relations. This situation is clear throughout many academic fields, even in what used to be the US universities' exclusive preserve, i.e. the famous MBAs.

[At the same time,] a radical change has occurred as opposed to the last decades (and a return somehow to the birth of universities in medieval Europe): excellence can no longer belong to one specific institution but only to a network of academic institutions. The question each parent or student must ask him/herself in the coming years is not "Is this university reputable?", it s rather "With which reputable institutions does this university collaborate?", "What sort of common curricula has this university developed with institutions from other countries?". In the coming decades, international academic excellence will follow such roads.

6. Avoid falling victim of an academic degree "subprime crisis" in ten years time

Despite all these indicators, the dominant stance continues to consider that American universities are a world's "must".

7. Think twenty years ahead when investing in a "prestigious degree"

[In the future] it will cost you less and profit you more professionally [to study] in Europe than in the US. In Asia, new excellence clusters are proliferating, even though their interconnections are still limited and therefore their "network" added-value must still progress; however this limitation is compensated by the growing economic and geopolitical importance of the region. It is risky to invest in a US degree today as its value could diminish even further than it already has.