Colleges Go Abroad; Take the Position
More U.S. colleges are opening branch campuses overseas, reflecting the growing demand for higher education across the globe and increasing desire among U.S. universities to internationalize their institutions and tap new revenue sources.
Call it a twist on college study abroad. After a few false starts, U.S. colleges and universities are setting up campuses in booming markets overseas.
New York University enrolled its first class of students at a just-opened Shanghai location in August. Texas A&M University announced plans in October to open a campus in Israel in 2015. George Mason University is preparing to open a campus in South Korea next spring.
The flurry of activity reflects the growing demand for higher education across the globe and increasing desire among U.S. universities to internationalize their institutions and tap new revenue sources. In some cases, local governments foot much of the bill.
"Universities are looking to expand abroad in order to enhance their global prestige, their ability to compete for new students and resources and to enhance their international experience of students and faculty," says education professor Jason Lane, a co-founder of the Cross-Border Education Research Team at the State University of New York-Albany. His team counts 178 such outposts in 53 countries — more than 11 times the 16 that existed in 1996.
An additional 11 branch campuses, six of them being planned by U.S. institutions, are in the works.
The USA has the largest presence of branch campuses, generally defined as those that offer degrees in a country other than the one where the main campus is based: 52 U.S. universities operate 82 campuses in 37 countries, the SUNY group's data show. The United Kingdom and Australia are next, with 22 and 15, respectively.
The United Arab Emirates hosts the largest concentration of branch campuses, 35, followed by China, with 15.
Lane likens branch campuses to technology start-ups. From 2002 to 2010, the number of branch campuses nearly doubled, from 82 to 162. From 2004 to 2010, at least a dozen folded, in some cases because of enrollment shortfalls, in others because of difficulties with overseas partners.
"There were lots of attempts to figure out how to be successful in a new market, and we were bound to see some fail along the way," he says.
Overseas initiatives often face challenges at home, too. At Duke, which is set to open a joint venture next fall with Wuhan University in China, "students are concerned about what this will mean for the Duke brand," says graduate student John Rash, who is part of an advisory group for the initiative. "Any student that is here on this campus (in Durham, N.C.) is very proud to be here and would not want to see anything tarnish that value."
Faculty at several campuses, including Yale, New York University and Wellesley, have raised doubts about whether academic freedom protections will apply in countries that have poor human-rights records.
"A university has a moral obligation to uphold those values," says Washington lawyer Jeffrey Lovitky, who has asked members of Congress to investigate Georgetown University's Qatar campus. His research shows that last year, the government-backed Qatar Foundation reimbursed Georgetown $45 million in costs plus a management fee of undisclosed amount to operate its school of foreign service in Qatar.
"All of this foreign money could influence how the teaching goes. These universities that are opening up campuses, they're really in it for the money, that's the only reason," he says.
Georgetown spokeswoman Rachel Pugh says the Qatar campus "is fully consistent with" the school's charter, mission and tax-exempt status.
Elizabeth Stroble, president of St. Louis-based Webster University, says branch campuses eventually must hold their own financially, but their success depends even more on whether they fit a university's mission. Webster opened its first international branch campus in 1978 in Geneva. It now operates six and plans to open a seventh in January in Ghana.
"We say that we ensure high-quality learning experiences that transform our students for individual excellence and global citizenship," Stroble says. "So that would be true no matter where we are."
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