In Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass," the Red Queen tells Alice: "Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that." In the first of a series of columns, this author discusses why the Red Queen principle, as it has come to be known, applies to the production of a highly educated population across nations. In this initial analysis, Doyle makes use of data from the OECD "Education at a Glance" indicators report, published every year from 1996 to 2003, to compare several nations' success at producing a college-educated population. He looks at the proportion of the population that has attained a type A-tertiary education (meaning essentially a bachelor's degree or higher in the U.S. context) in Canada, Korea, Japan, Norway, and the United States. These nations were chosen because they have the highest production of university-level education, particularly among young people. (Contains 3 charts.)