Needless to say (which is why I will), it's an exciting time to be in education. The promise of change is in the air, driven by technology, social change, and (perhaps most significantly) economic and political power shifts to countries like China, India, and Brazil...and regions like Africa and the Middle East. A small sample of the enormity of the change - China’s Higher Ed Explosion: "In pure bulk, the numbers behind China’s expansion are startling. Between 1999, shortly after the country’s leaders decided to focus on expanding access to and improving the quality of higher education as tools to propel the former Third World economy into the leading ranks of the world’s powers, and 2005, the number of undergraduate and graduate students earning degrees from China’s colleges and universities quadrupled, rising to 3.1 million from 830,000. Enrollments grew even faster over that period, with the number of new entering students growing to nearly 5 million in 2005."