Jason E. Lane is one of the founders of the Cross-Border Education Research Team, which has been monitoring the transnational education (TNE) sector since 2010. According to its data, the United States is the top player – it has 97 overseas campuses. In comparison, Canada fields just eight.
Opening a satellite location is not for the faint of heart. TNE often requires significant financial investments, which can evaporate if the school fails to attract students or runs into political trouble in the host country.
“There are a range of challenges,” Lane said. “These include maintaining the quality of teaching and offering the types of educational experiences that are available on the main campus.”
Some top American schools, including Harvard and Princeton, have declined to pursue the TNE model, instead relying on partnerships to build their international profiles.
While America remains the leader, Australia, with a population of just 27 million people, punches far above its weight, with 24 satellite campuses.
“Australia has a long history of being internationally engaged,” Lane said. “They looked at their own slowly growing population base and decided to expand overseas. It’s part of a longer term strategy of internationalisation.”
There are a range of challenges… These include maintaining the quality of teaching and offering the types of educational experiences that are available on the main campusJason E. Lane, Cross-Border Research Team
Recently, some universities have backtracked on their commitment to foreign campuses. Last year, Texas A&M University announced that it was closing its 20-year-old campus in Qatar to focus on its core work in the United States. Board chair Bill Mahomes said the school “did not necessarily need a campus infrastructure 8,000 miles away to support education and research collaboration”.
In August, the University of Calgary shuttered its Qatar site after providing training to local learners there for many years. It provided no reason for the decision and did not respond to a request for more information.
For David Robinson, the executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, the answer is clear: “In the end, as Calgary’s experience shows, I think branch campuses have largely turned out to be a failed business model.”
Robinson said the association had “for many years” raised concerns about institutions setting up campuses in parts of the world where academic freedom might not be upheld or respected in the same way as it would in Canada.
Academic freedom worries are also prevalent in the US, Lane told The PIE News. “A lot of US campuses have gotten into establishing foreign campuses while wanting guarantees of academic freedom. But those countries may have different definitions of academic freedom.”
Overseas campuses serve a wide range of students. In some cases, especially in the Middle East, satellites enrol only local or regional learners.
Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, has had a site at a castle in England for 30 years; many of the students attending are on a semester or year abroad from the Canadian campus.
Others leverage their overseas satellites to attract attendees from across the globe. Webster University, based in St. Louis, Missouri, has operations in several locations, including Geneva.
It offers a seamless transition between taking courses there and at the US campus. The Swiss school draws students from many countries; diverse classes prepare students to work with people from a wide variety of backgrounds.
New campuses are now reflecting shifts in the global geopolitical alignment, Lane says. After Hungary tilted to the right and fell into the Russia-China orbit, Fudan University of Shanghai opened a satellite in that country.
With its growing population and improving economic development, Africa is increasingly viewed as a potential market. Currently, universities from the United States, United Kingdom, France and Netherlands have satellites on the African continent.
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