For higher education, globalization implies the broad social, economic, and technological forces that shape the realities of the 21st century. These elements include advanced information technology, new ways of thinking about financing higher education and a concomitant acceptance of market forces and commercialization, unprecedented mobility for students and professors, the global spread of common ideas about science and scholarship, the role of English as the main international language of science, and other developments. Today, trends such as the rise of the Internet and the globalization of knowledge have the potential for creating severe problems for academic institutions and systems in smaller or poorer nations. In a world divided into centers and peripheries, the centers grow stronger and more dominant and the peripheries become increasingly marginalized. Inequalities grow more pronounced. The traditional academic center becomes ever stronger and more dominant-mainly in the Englishspeaking countries of the North (the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada) and in Australia, and in the larger countries of the European Union (notably Germany and France, and to some extent Italy and Spain).