One of the most interesting (to me, anyways) facets of international higher education is the phenomenon of international medical schools.

In North America, we associate these exclusively with medical schools in the Caribbean.  These mainly for-profit institutions have little research capacity and mainly teach students who are unable to get into mainstream domestic institution (they were most famously satirized in Doonesbury, when the famously dissolute Duke went to Port-au-Prince to open the Baby Doc School of Offshore Medicine in Port-au-Prince).  There’s St. George’s University in Grenada (whose residents famously needed rescuing by Marines in 1983), the Medical University of the Americas in Nevis, Caribbean Medical University in Curacao.  The one which advertises most aggressively in Canada, is Ross University, located in Dominica, which is owned by DeVry.

Most people get sniffy when they hear about this.  Typical American neo-liberal set-up, they say.  But the thing is this kind of offshore arrangement is increasingly common around the world.  For instance, Germans have a whole range of offshore medical school options.  It’s just that they are located in Hungary rather than the Caribbean.  Seeing the excess demand for medical school places in Germany, a clutch of Hungarian universities – public universities, mind – began offering medical programs in German and English to some success.

(On the whole, of course, German students prefer doing their studies in a German-speaking country.  For quite some years their favorite tactic was to enroll at the University of Vienna, which like all universities in Austria is open access, and places were awarded in a first-come first-serve rather than a competitive basis.  This would result in line-up outside the registrar’s office starting a week to ten days before registration day.  Many of the locals found this quite irritating, as they not unreasonably thought the University should mostly be educating Austrians rather than Germans, and they tried to close access to medicine to non-nationals. However, because of EU rules on freedom of movement and national treatment, the European Commission told the Austrians that first-come-first-serve for Austrians meant first-come-first-serve for all EU nationals.  Last I heard this has gone to the European Court.  Meanwhile, Hungarian schools are cashing in.)

There are other examples of this.  In Malaysia, for instance, public medical schools tend to cater mainly to ethnic Malays.  The Chinese community has organized itself in such a way as to create local alternatives (e.g. Taylor’s University School of Medicine), but the Tamil community has tended to go the offshore route, heading in the thousands towards medical schools in Ukraine and Western Russia (e.g. Kursk State Medical University).

You can deny people admission to expensive higher education programs.  But helping students denied entry to a program is the very definition of a market opportunity.  Some institution, somewhere, is going to try to meet that need.  It just isn’t always going to be in the paces you think.  But in medicine at least, it creates some of the world’s more unlikely international student flows.