Introduction: Global Higher Education, Diversity and Inequality: Trends, Prospects and Challenges

Beginning in 2003, Walter Allen co-convened and codirected an international consortium of scholars dedicated to examining the “Implications, Challenges and Lessons from Increased Student Diversity in Higher Education” (http://choices.gseis.ucla.edu/21stcentury/). The larger group includes 35 scholars from fourteen different nations and five continents who are concerned with diversity in higher education. For our purposes, diversity is broadly defined to encompass not only race/ethnicity but also gender, language, citizenship, social class, culture, and region as significant in each national system of status hierarchy. The inaugural meeting of the consortium was held at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy.