A growing number of colleges and universities are emerging as multinational organizations—creating startup versions of themselves in foreign countries.
Those vacationing in western France may drive past a campus of Georgia Institute of Technology. Similarly, those visiting Italy may come across a Johns Hopkins nestled in Bologna; or if you are a visitor to Rwanda, you may come across a Carnegie Mellon University campus.
According to the Cross-Border Education Research Team (C-BERT) at SUNY-Albany, 51 U.S. universities now operate 83 branch campuses outside of the United States. Arkansas State has recently announced it will build a campus in Mexico. Qatar is already home to campuses from six American universities.
Students can now earn degrees from New York University in New York City, Abu Dhabi, or Shanghai.
This sort of activity is being duplicated by institutions from Australia, the United Kingdom, India, and more than two dozen other countries. Globally, universities in 32 countries export 235 branch campuses across 73 nations.
How are we to understand these developments? Do they bring advantages for students, academia, as well as nations? Have higher education institutions become tools of public diplomacy? Or, are such institutions evolving into multiple national corporations with limited affinity with their home nation?
For the past five years, as co-directors of C-BERT, we have been tracking the development of this phenomenon, research that has included visits to some 50 of these institutions in 15 countries.
Universities Go Global
The fact is that no longer are global activities limited to the for-profit educational conglomerates such as the Apollo Group University of Phoenix and Laureate that have developed an international footprint through investment in online education and the purchase of colleges in multiple countries.
Rather, a growing number of public and private nonprofit universities have entered this space, creating, for example, branch campuses where a student in a local country can attend classes, join student organizations, engage in research projects, and earn a degree awarded in the name of the home campus.
The earliest branch campus we’ve identified opened in the 1920s, when Parsons Fashion School in New York opened a location in Paris, so it could be in the fashion capital of the world, even though much of the growth in this sector started only in the 2000s.
Today, this effort is not limited to a handful of elite four-year institutions; it includes schools ranging from community colleges to boutique graduate schools, offering associates’ degrees to doctorates.
Proponents argue that branch campuses provide needed educational capacity in underserved areas, while allowing the home institution to diversify its revenue and enhance its reputation. Critics claim that operating under authoritarian governments hampers the academic freedom of faculty and students.
Push and Pull Factors
Most branch campuses seem to fall somewhere in between the glorious and the atrocious. But, first, let us look at some of the factors leading to the setting up of these branch campuses.
In our view, there are a number of internal factors pushing institutions to open branches—mainly, resources, regulations, and reputation.
