April 9, 2008 — Exporting Higher Ed

Fifth District universities are establishing branch campuses around the world
By Ernie Siciliano

Assma Al-Adawi is a junior at Georgetown University. She will graduate in 2009 with a degree in international relations, yet she has never set foot in Washington, D.C., where Georgetown's main campus is located. Instead, she attends Georgetown's branch campus thousands of miles away in Doha, Qatar.

Al-Adawi's professors hail from American universities, and her degree will be the same as that of any student in Georgetown's School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C. "It's been awhile since Arab universities have developed good educational programs," Al-Adawi explains. "No one denies that the West right now is superior in terms of development, so why not take advantage of that?"

Branch campuses have been built overseas by American schools since the 1970s. Georgetown's Qatar branch opened in 2005, while other Fifth District institutions like Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), George Mason University, and Duke University have their own branches in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Singapore, respectively. They have joined a growing number of higher education providers entering overseas markets.

"It's mushroomed," says Philip Altbach, director of Boston College's Center for International Higher Education. "There have always been a number of [U.S.] branch campuses overseas, but this is a new phenomenon over the last five years, and it's really picked up over the last two years."

The Observatory on Borderless Higher Education, a London-based research group, counted 24 branch campuses in 2002 compared with 82 in 2006. The study included all international institutions, but more than half of the branch campuses were American. "

More and more universities want to be involved in transnational education, to enter new student markets and potentially generate increased revenue, and to build research and business links in other countries," says Rosa Becker, the research director at the Observatory.

American universities are also leveraging their comparative advantage. The United States has long been a world leader in providing quality higher education. "In several countries, a higher education degree from a foreign university — especially from one in the United States or the United Kingdom — is often seen as being of higher value than a domestic degree," Becker notes.

VCU has operated an art school in Qatar for a decade now. According to Ian Little, the university's director of international student recruitment, applications are rising. The funding for the VCU branch campus was provided by a project called Education City, which is sponsored by a royal family in Qatar. The project, located on 2,500 acres on the outskirts of Doha, has attracted other universities like Texas A&M and Carnegie Mellon.

The Middle East is one of the most popular regions for branch campuses. Growing oil wealth has provided generous funding for school infrastructure and scholarships for students. In the past, the region's governments supported students interested in pursuing an education in petroleum engineering. Now they are funding more students with different interests.

Altbach at Boston College says that in most cases — Saudi Arabia is an exception — Middle Eastern governments believe that attracting branch universities is the most efficient way to bring higher education to their countries. "They feel they don't have the internal capacity in terms of local people who have Ph.D.s and the ability to build a university," Altbach says.

However, he adds, American schools may run the risk of overexpanding. Financial backing from Arab governments may cause schools to provide more supply than the populations need. "The jury is still out," Altbach notes. "It's not clear to me that all these foreign institutions can find enough qualified customers to fill them."

American universities have their own motives for expanding abroad. For example, having a branch campus allows a school to develop name recognition and attract foreign students to graduate-level and study-abroad programs in America. For the 2006-2007 academic year, the number of international students studying in the United States was 582,984, according to a study by the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit training organization.

"[In the Middle East] people have a higher opinion and a more well-informed opinion of VCU than they do in the West Coast," Little explains about his school's motivations.

Attracting foreign students to the United States can be profitable for universities. Students at public colleges pay out-of-state tuition and many foreign governments are willing to support students with scholarships. The Institute of International Education found that international students spent $1.3 billion of their own money on tuition, fees, and living expenses to attend colleges in the Fifth District, while more than $14 billion was spent nationwide. (Campus-based funding is excluded from the figure.)

VCU has tried to extend its brand recognition into other countries, Little says. The university has entered into 16 partnerships with schools around the world. By 2020, the goal is to have 10 percent of the students at its Richmond campus visiting from abroad.

Ernie Siciliano is a Publications intern in the Richmond Fed's Research Department.