A Thought on the Iran War

So, somehow, President Prince of Peace has got the United States into a shooting war with Iran, and, in a development NO ONE COULD HAVE POSSIBLY FORESEEN, Iran has retaliated in part by attacking American allies around the Persian Gulf. Although it is about an eight-tier priority right now, one of the questions the war is raising right now: what is the fate of the United Arab Emirates’ international education industry? Can Dubai, and the region as a whole, regain a reputation for safety so that it can remain an education hub?

It’s an interesting question, and obviously it is far too early to say for sure what the downstream impacts of this lunatic, unprovoked aggression will be, but here are some considerations to think about.

The main one is that war can easily re-route international student pathways. We saw how the invasion of 2022 Ukraine, by another bloodthirsty septuagenarian, immediately saw reductions of between 60 and 80% in the number of students heading to Ukraine, and a plateauing of growth in the number of students heading to Russia (over 80% of whom are from the 5 former Soviet central Asian republics).

We have also seen how this kind of event can get other countries to change their tactics. Specifically, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan used the war to start re-orienting both their foreign policies and their international education strategies in a southwards direction, towards Iran, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. “Hey”, they said to themselves, “if those students can’t go to Russia, why wouldn’t they come here?”. Success on this front to date may not have been earth-shaking, but progress has definitely been made.

Now, the main difference of course, is that the Iran War is not yet the Ukraine War. It’s only a couple of weeks old rather than 4 years and counting and, unlike poor Ukraine, the Gulf States are being bombed but not physically invaded. If this turns out to be a 3-week war and things get back to normal fairly quickly thereafter, then my guess is that Dubai and the Gulf go back to the status quo ante pretty quickly.

The question though, is what if it doesn’t. What if Cheeto Jesus never gets tired of bombing Iran? If Metamucilini’s insecurities mean that he can’t leave until Iran abases itself before him (Iran is not going to abase itself)? If, therefore, Iran keeps throwing missiles across and into the Strait of Hormuz such that normal life cannot resume in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and all those foreigners after some zero-tax fantasy leave for good? Then, quite simply, that’s the end of a lot of branch campuses, I think. No safety, no foreign education outposts. A lot of schools could lose their investments.

If that were the case, where would international students go? Where would Gulf students go? Two obvious answers come to mind. 

To the extent that the market for Gulf students is largely a Muslim market, then the first is Malaysia. It already hosts hundreds of thousands of international students, and has a regulatory set up that could probably cope with a lot of institutions coming all at once to set up quickly. The other is central Asia – specifically, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. These two countries are not, for the moment, education hubs in the sense that Dubai and to a lesser extent Malaysia are. They have a lot of foreign campuses, but they are geared more towards local populations. But they have the money, space and increasingly the regulatory capacity to host a lot more campuses than they do.

(Of course, if the regime in Iran falls, maybe Tehran will be the new hot international campus spot in 2027, as a new government seeks international help in rebuilding a university system discredited by a long period of co-optation by a deeply authoritarian government. Stranger things have happened.)

Now, like I said, Dubai-quickly-back-to-normal is probably the likeliest end result here. But my point is it’s not the only possible result. If you’re about to get into the business of transnational education (and it sure seems as though everyone in Canada is thinking along these lines at the moment), just remember that political risk matters. Contingency planning matters. Nothing is simple, or risk-free.