Book review of the day: "The Great Brain Race"

The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities are Reshaping the World.

Ben Wildavsky, the author of "The Great Brain Race," has been to Education City. In fact, while researching this comprehensive and fascinating book, he seems to have been everywhere. Formerly in charge of college ratings for U.S. News & World Report and now a fellow at Brookings and at the Kauffman Foundation, Mr. Wildavsky has toured the horizon and conducted dozens of interviews along the way. He reports on American universities, notably NYU, branching out internationally; on foreign governments, like China's, spending vast sums to improve their own institutions, partly to attract scholars and students from abroad; on for-profit businesses, like Laureate and the Washington Post Co.'s Kaplan Inc., planting campuses in remote global locations; and, perhaps in too much detail, on the attempt to rank international universities. (According to Times Higher Education, a London-based magazine, Harvard is No. 1; Peking University, No. 52.). Source: WSJ.