The world of transnational education – that is, the provision of education in one country by universities based abroad – is getting very interesting these days. In particular, branch campuses have returned to the centre of the industry’s activities in a way they have not been for well over a decade. Canada’s post-secondary system – which has always been a laggard in this area – risks getting left even further behind, unless institutions up their game substantially in the next twelve months.
First – let’s be clear about terminology. Transnational education is very definitely not just about showing up somewhere and building a branch campus. There are lots of ways to do transnational education. There is distance education done with a local partner. There are franchising arrangements. There are partnerships with local providers, either at the program level or (occasionally) at the level of creating a whole new institution. And, yes, there are branch campuses. Put all these types together and you’re talking well over a million students worldwide.
But what’s getting people excited these days are branch campuses. Greece – hitherto staunchly committed to keeping local public universities in a monopoly position – authorized four foreign universities to open campuses in partnership with local ones last year. Kazakhstan allowed new universities from Italy, France and Wales to open; while the Saudis accepted new universities from Australia and the United States. The big news however, was from India, where the government greenlit 16 new foreign campuses, nine run by UK institutions and seven by Australian ones.
Back in the day, branch campuses were just things that rich (mostly anglophone) countries opened in countries that were less developed but getting rich at a pace fast enough that money wouldn’t be an issue (e.g. China, Malaysia, Qatar, the UAE). That’s not the deal anymore. First of all, we are seeing a lot more non-anglophone branch campuses (Vietnam and Uzbekistan both got one last year). Second of all, poorer countries are looking for branch campuses to help deal with massive demand issues (e.g. Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan and Mauritania). And third of all, some very middle-income countries are getting into the export business too. Egyptian and Moroccan universities are starting to spread across Africa, Kazakh campuses have opener or are opening in Russia, Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan, and IIT Bombay is even contemplating opening a campus in the United States by 2030.
If you ask me, this business gets a lot more interesting once stripped of its semi-colonial trappings.
Anyways, amidst this mini-boom in branch campuses, last week the United Kingdom issued its new international education strategy. It’s quite detailed and ambitious. It uses a much wider definition of “education exports” than any Canadian document ever would, and – crucially – understands that making a mark in education exports requires a lot of Government support. When reading it, there are no circumstances under which you could mistake it for a made-in-Canada strategy.
The document has loads of interesting features, but for our purposes one stands out – the UK government wants education exports, but it doesn’t really want students to be in the UK. Hence a hard pivot towards supporting efforts to deliver UK education abroad, via partnerships. And in fact, it specifically identifies five countries – India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam – as places the government wishes to target. Not coincidentally, the Indonesian President was in London last week, talking about his desire to see ten UK institutions set up shop in his country. And the week before that, three UK universities decided to join forces to launch degree programs in nearby Thailand. UK higher education may be in dire shape at home, but it is booming abroad.
Canadian higher education has always approached the idea of transnational education very gingerly. Waterloo tried putting up a campus in the Gulf but retreated incredibly quickly. UCalgary bugged out of its Nursing school in Qatar for reasons I am not entirely clear on. UPEI runs a campus in Cairo in which TMU participated for a very brief time before scarpering. I could go on, but you get the idea. At the moment the only Canadian university in the Gulf is Royal Roads University (you can listen to my interview with RRU’s President Phillip Steenkamp on this issue here).
Why has this been so? Why have the UK and Australia been so far ahead of Canada in this area? Bluntly: necessity is the mother of invention, and our institutions have simply never been poorly funded enough to see the need to take on all the work and risk necessary to make these things work. Plus, hey, bringing students to Canada was so easy and so profitable for so long that nobody felt actual transnational education was worth the effort.
Guess what, though? Those days are over. If anyone wants to make a global name for themselves, or pick up those extra dollars from international students, from here on in, it’s largely going to have to be through partnerships abroad. But we’re starting from behind: and the UK, in particular, seems to be powering up to make the gap even bigger. So how can your average institution think about getting in the game without getting steamrollered?
Over the next few months, Higher Education Strategy Associates will be producing The Transnational Education Strategy Project. It’s a syndicated research project in which participating institutions (all welcome! You too, provincial governments!) can learn more about how the world of Transnational Education works. We’ll be providing institutions with detailed market reports, as well as advice on topics like vetting potential partners, measuring success, and handling Quality Assurance issues. All this to be accompanied by monthly webinars with experts from around the world with practical experience in setting up and managing global partnerships.
Interested? Read more here and give us a shout at tmaclennan@higheredstrategy.com. We’d love to have you on board for the ride.
