International branch campus

American University of Beirut

While the internationalization of higher education is considered a contemporary phenomenon, it has a variety of historical roots. During the colonial era, the practice of setting up "branch" institutions in foreign countries or sponsoring schools in the colonies was commonplace, serving the most basic purposes characteristic of the period. This practice continued into the nineteenth century by American Protestant missionaries, who established colleges grounded in the U.S. model in countries such as Egypt, Turkey and Lebanon, practices from which the American University of Beirut was founded.[2] In a broader sense, higher education institutions have long held global orientations, in that they served international students, employed professors from different countries, and functioned chiefly in the common language of Latin.[3]

Close resemblances of the contemporary branch campus model emerged in the early twentieth century. At this time, these campuses functioned primarily to serve U.S. military and civilian personnel in the U.S.-owned Canal Zone.[4] Florida State University, among other institutions, began providing this type of cross-border program as early 1933. In the 1950s, Johns Hopkins University opened a branch campus in Italy which is now considered the oldest established branch campus still in operation.[5] The first concentration of branch campuses in a single country was established in Japan during the 1980s for various diplomatic reasons. Wanting to improve the relationship between Japan and the United States, the Japanese government recruited several U.S. universities to establish branch campuses on its soil, of which nearly 30 did in cooperation with Japanese institutions or private companies.[6] Only one of these campuses (Temple University, Japan Campus) remain today; the rest mostly closing due to inconvenient locations and difficulties in English language instruction.[7]

International branch campuses began to proliferate in the mid-1990s and further into the twenty-first century. The first non-American institution to establish a branch campus in the modern era was French Fashion University that opened in Norway in 1990. The rest of the 1990s saw a wave of diversifying institutions expanding abroad, primarily from Australia, Mexico, Chile, Ireland, Canada, Italy, the UK, and Sweden; to target areas in Africa, Southeast and East Asia, the Middle East and South America.[8] There were approximately 50 IBCs at the end of the '90s boom (not including those in the Japanese bubble), reaching 183 in 2011.[9][10] Some have seen the development of the IBCs an extraordinary form of privatization in the public sector (largely due to the geographic separation from the state); however, Jason E. Lane and Kevin Kinser have argued that the extent of an IBCs privatization should also be assessed in relation to fulfilling public purposes in the host country.[11] As of 2015, there are 282 branch campuses worldwide.[12] Not included in this figure are the range of for-profit providers, such as The Apollo Group through the University of Phoenix, who now has campuses in Mexico, India, Latin America and parts of Europe.[13]

Most international branch campuses are located throughout Asia and the Middle East.[17] IBCs have developed in dense pockets in regions such as the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and Malaysia. Both the United Arab Emirates and Qatar have transformed themselves as educational hubs (a collection of campuses from multiple institutions in a common space, creating educational 'hubs', 'cities,' or 'parks'), with Saudi Arabia and Malaysia following closely behind. These academic reforms are mostly market-driven; approximately two-thirds of the new universities in the Arab Middle East are private and nearly half are branches of Western institutions, mostly from the United States,[18] and others from Australia and the United Kingdom.[19][20]

Many of the countries with the most IBCs (United Arab Emirates, Qatar, China, Malaysia and Singapore) have struggled with the problem of brain drain.[21][22][23] The logic of hosting a foreign institution's branch campus is to prevent local students from actually studying abroad by luring them to stay by receiving a foreign degree at home and at a considerably lower cost.[24][25] Hosting a foreign branch campus can also enhance links with industry, as in some cases programs offered at the campus are aligned by the government to reflect the nation's industry needs; in other cases, such as typically in the Arab Middle East, IBCs help expedite the process of transitioning from an oil economy to a knowledge economy.[26]

Qatar: Education City

LAS Building at Education City The Liberal Arts and Science (LAS) building on the Education City campus in Doha, Qatar, where classes used to be held for both Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar and for Texas A&M University at Qatar.

Qatar's Education City was developed to attract top programs, primarily from the United States in order to enhance the educational offerings in the country.[33] While IBCs in Education City remain private institutions, the construction of Education City was funded through the royal family's Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development.[34] As of 2022, there are seven international universities (six American, one French) with programs available at IBCs in the Education City, in addition to one Qatari university.[35] The curriculum is taught in English and features the traditional U.S. model of general education. Students can enroll in courses from multiple IBCs at one time.[36] The eight institutions in Education City include:[35]

• Virginia Commonwealth University
• Weill Cornell Medical College
• Texas A&M
• Carnegie Mellon
• Georgetown University School of Foreign Service
• Northwestern University
• Hautes Etudes Commerciales de (HEC) Paris
• Hamad Bin Khalifa University

Most IBCs focus initially on providing education; however, some IBCs have evidenced interest and commitment to engaging in research.[40] Hans Pohl and Jason E. Lane developed a methodology using SciVal data to determine the research productivity of faculty/researchers at IBCs.[41] Their research demonstrated that IBCs in countries such as Qatar, UAE, and Malaysia contribute a significant portion of those nation's overall research productivity. However, in an analysis of research-producing universities in Abu Dhabi, their research suggested that IBCs may not necessarily have greater impact than other forms of educational investment when it comes to overall research productivity.[42]

The Cross-Border Education Research Team (C-BERT) was founded in 2010 by Professors Jason Lane and Kevin Kinser, then at the State University of New York at Albany, to track and study the development of international branch campuses. C-BERT maintains the only publicly accessible list of IBCs operating around the world, which is important as the entities are disbursed across dozens of countries and often not tracked through other educational data collections. C-BERT's efforts to advance knowledge about international branch campuses has been recognized by the Association for the Study of Higher Education with their award for Outstanding Contributions to International Education Research.

Though a variety of studies concerning the student experience and satisfaction in IBCs have found that most students react to their branch campuses similarly to their peers at the home institutions,[43] criticism of IBCs abound. Most prominent among these concerns are those that relate to attracting and retaining host campus faculty, misalignment between home and branch campus,[44] replicating diversity and quality of the student body,[45] mirroring forms of cultural imperialism,[46] lack of data to drive decision-making,[47] organizational culture,[48] and the ability of IBCs to adapt to the "new" local context.[49]

• Branch campuses
• Rise of Education City Qatar