In the course of presenting a very interesting paper on international college rankings at an accountability conference I co-hosted yesterday, Ben Wildavsky made an observation that I strongly endorse: international competition in higher education isn’t a zero-sum game. In fact, I think there’s a good argument that America would be better off if we no longer towered above most other countries in college attainment.

Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t compare ourselves to other countries and act on the results. The legitimate methodological questions raised in this recent report from Cliff Adelman at IHEP notwithstanding, I think it’s clear that, overall, America’s historic advantage over other countries in college attainment has shrunk, and if you throw associate’s degrees into the mix we’re no longer number one. If Canada can help roughly 50 percent of its adult population get some kind of post-secondary degree and we’re only at 40 percent, then 50 percent seems like a reasonable goal to shoot for. And if other countries can achieve significant increases in college attainment over the course of one generation, it’s reasonable to think that we could too.

But that’s not the same as saying that it’s bad for America that lots more Canadian students are earning college degrees. One of the reasons Canada is our biggest trading partner is that it has a stable democratic government and a highly-developed economy full of well-educated people who make enough money to buy products like iPods from the United States as well as provide universal health care to fellow citizens who then do useful things like make very good indie rock albums that people in America buy in turn. And if you run down the list of our closest higher education competitors—Finland, New Zealand, Norway, Japan—one can make similar observations. By contrast, none of our competitors are destabilizing their respective regions or miring U.N. troops in internecine warfare or letting large segments of their populations starve. That’s probably not a coincidence. Think of it this way: If, from a position of pure American self-interest, we could press a button and reduce the college attainment rate of every other country to at least five percentage points below ours, should we? I’d say the answer is obviously no.

Granted, there are a couple of clear complications to this idea. First, it wasn’t that long ago that the country which invented the research university and produced some of the greatest works of art and philosophy the world has ever known decided to direct its intellectual and productive capacity toward waging a massive campaign of slaughter and world domination. All I can say is that I hope those two things are orthogonal to one another because if not, we’re all doomed. Second, Canada, New Zealand et al are a lot smaller that we are. What if a country that’s much bigger exceeds our proportional level of human capital? If that means it becomes harder for us to buy consumer goods produced in foreign sweatshops on the cheap, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. The question is bound up in larger cultural, political and geostrategic issues that are hard to predict. Again, I’d like to believe we’re all better off in a world where more people escape the immiseration of ignorance and poverty and have access to the universe of human potential that higher education affords.

Why, then, are international comparisons so often framed in threatening terms? Politics, mostly. People are invigorated by competitive pressure laced with fear. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say, “What we need is another Sputnik.” Insofar as this is more or less the same thing as saying “What we need is for the populace to be so terrified by the prospect of nuclear annihilation and / or worldwide subservience to a totalitarian and dehumanizing ideological system highly correlated with genocide that they’ll invest some more money in science and math education even though it’s not entirely clear what the one really has to do with the other,” I’ve always wondered if those people were really thinking things through. Better that we should invest in higher education with the aim of spreading its benefits as far and wide as possible, not just for our own good but for everyone, since in the long run they’re really one and the same.