Can universities compete for talent while strengthening one another's intellectual capacity?

International cooperation has become an almost unquestioned priority in higher education. Universities sign partnership agreements, exchange students and researchers, and establish joint academic and scientific initiatives. Each new connection is presented as another step towards a more open and interconnected educational world.

Yet these same institutions operate within systems that increasingly compete for the people who create, develop, and apply knowledge. The university welcomed as a partner today may also be competing tomorrow for the students, researchers, and future academics on whom its partner's development depends.

Can cooperation remain mutually enriching when success is increasingly defined by the ability to attract and retain intellectual talent?

This is more than a question of institutional diplomacy. Higher education now plays a strategic role in national innovation, economic competitiveness, and the formation of a highly skilled workforce. The competition for international students is particularly visible at advanced levels of study. According to the OECD's Education at a Glance 2026, international students accounted for an average of 34% of new doctoral entrants across OECD countries in 2024, compared with 11% at bachelor's level. These figures illustrate the significance of international mobility within research-oriented education; they do not, on their own, tell us whether its consequences are balanced across institutions and countries.

Consider two universities entering into an academic partnership. One provides access to advanced laboratories and a wider range of research opportunities. The other sends a talented student whose abilities have been developed through years of education and mentorship. The student succeeds, builds professional relationships, and decides to continue a career in the receiving country.

For that individual, the partnership may have opened an important path. For the receiving university, it may have strengthened a research team. For the university of origin, the result is less straightforward. It may have gained valuable connections and a future collaborator, but it may also have lost the opportunity to build a research programme around that graduate.

None of these outcomes should be assumed in advance. People are not intellectual assets owned by the institutions that educate them. Students and researchers have their own ambitions and the right to choose where their work and lives develop. Moreover, a person who remains abroad may continue contributing to the institution of origin through shared research, mentoring, networks, or new partnerships. The effects of mobility depend on what follows it, not merely on the direction of travel.

The difficulty arises because three different interests are often discussed as though they were one. The individual seeks opportunities for growth. The university seeks stronger academic capabilities and institutional sustainability. The national educational system seeks the long-term capacity to educate specialists and generate knowledge. These interests can reinforce one another, but they do not automatically converge.

Our usual language of internationalisation does little to resolve this distinction. We count agreements signed, students exchanged, visiting scholars hosted, and publications produced. Such indicators are useful: they tell us whether cooperation is taking place and what it has produced in the short term. But they cannot, by themselves, tell us what has changed in the institutions taking part. Activity is visible; the development of lasting capacity is harder to see.

This leads to a more fundamental distinction between sharing knowledge and sustaining the ability to create it.

Knowledge is unusual in that sharing it need not diminish it. An idea can travel between researchers, be challenged, refined, and become the foundation of discoveries that neither could have made alone. In this sense, intellectual exchange is not necessarily a zero-sum process.

The conditions under which new knowledge is produced are different. A functioning research environment requires people, mentorship, scientific continuity, equipment, institutional trust, and the time needed to develop new generations of scholars. Those conditions are neither infinitely reproducible nor evenly distributed. As a result, knowledge may circulate freely while the capacity to produce it becomes more concentrated.

This is the deeper paradox of academic cooperation. A partnership may expand access to existing knowledge without strengthening both partners' ability to generate new knowledge independently or together. Recognising that possibility does not invalidate international mobility. It asks us to examine the architecture of the relationship rather than celebrate the movement it enables.

The conventional answer is often reciprocity, understood as balanced exchange: comparable numbers of students, equivalent visits, or matching institutional commitments. But arithmetic symmetry is a poor substitute for mutual development. Universities differ in scale, resources, research traditions, and the problems they are best equipped to address. Their contributions need not look alike to be valuable to each other.

A university with specialised laboratories might work with a partner possessing deep expertise in an industrial challenge or access to a distinctive research environment. One brings infrastructure; the other brings knowledge of a problem that gives that infrastructure new purpose. The value lies not in ensuring that each side contributes the same thing, but in what becomes possible through their combination.

Reciprocity, in this sense, is not equality of inputs. It is the creation of meaningful capabilities for both partners.

This principle changes how we design academic cooperation. Student mobility can become part of a jointly developed curriculum. A visiting researcher's work can lead to sustained co-supervision of doctoral students. A scientific project can establish a research group or method that continues after the original project ends. These are not guarantees of mutual benefit, but ways in which temporary interaction can become durable institutional capacity.

The difference matters because a completed activity and a strengthened institution are not the same outcome. A joint paper may advance a field without changing the long-term capabilities of either university. A successful exchange programme may transform the participants' lives without leaving an enduring academic structure behind. Both achievements have value. They simply answer different questions.

If institutional development is one of the purposes of cooperation, its evaluation must therefore go beyond immediate outputs. We should examine whether partners have developed new expertise, built sustainable research relationships, improved their ability to train future scholars, or gained opportunities they could not have created separately. We should also examine who shapes the research agenda, who receives recognition, and who can continue using the knowledge and infrastructure created. Without attention to these conditions, the language of partnership can conceal very different levels of influence and benefit.

Competition does not disappear from this picture, nor should it. Universities have legitimate reasons to attract talented people and pursue excellence. Competition can encourage better programmes, stronger research environments, and more ambitious institutions. The problem begins when talent acquisition becomes the principal measure of international success, while the development of the partner is treated as a secondary or incidental outcome.

The choice, then, is not between competition and cooperation. Nor is it between freedom of mobility and institutional interests. The real task is to build relationships in which individual opportunity, competitive ambition, and the renewal of intellectual capacity can coexist. That requires a different understanding of success: not merely what each institution has gained from the other, but what neither would have been able to create without the other.

An international partnership should not be judged at the moment an agreement is signed, or even when an exchange is completed. Its deeper value becomes visible later, in the knowledge-generating capabilities, academic relationships, and possibilities that remain.

If two universities have exchanged people and knowledge, but only one has expanded its ability to create knowledge, what have they truly built together?

Source: OECD (2026), Education at a Glance 2026, Chapter B4: “What is the profile of international students and how is mobility evolving?”. The figures refer to new entrants in 2024 across OECD countries, not all enrolled students.