The summit of President Barack Obama with his counterparts from Mexico and Canada was a missed opportunity to relaunch the 20-year-old free trade agreement among the three countries, but it produced a little-noticed plan that may have a big impact on North America’s economic and cultural integration in coming years.

While much of the media coverage of Wednesday’s summit in Toluca, Mexico, focused on the presidents agreements on energy and security issues, their most important talks may have centered on a dramatic increase of academic and student exchanges, as well as joint scientific research and innovation centers.

According to senior Mexican officials, at a U.S.-Mexico meeting during the summit, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto showed Obama a poster with a graphic explanation of a new Mexican plan to increase the number of Mexican students in U.S. colleges from the current 13,800 to 100,000 by 2018.

The poster, a copy of which was e-mailed to me, shows that Mexico plans to double its students in U.S. colleges to 27,000 this year, add another 46,000 by 2015, 64,500 by 2016, 82,000 by 2017 and 100,000 by 2018 — for a combined total of 319,500 students over the next four years.

via Andres Oppenheimer: The good and the bad of North America’s summit – Andres Oppenheimer – MiamiHerald.com.