Branch campuses are not a failed experiment

Anyone who thinks about the internationalisation of higher education might remark that the sector has always had a significant international dimension. Exemplars range from the wandering scholars of ancient China and the sophists of classical Greece to the students and teachers of medieval Europe, shuttling among Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge.

In more recent centuries, such people movement has accelerated. In the UK, the Thatcher government’s introduction of “full cost” fees for international students from 1980 catalysed a rapid growth in proactive recruitment that has been sustained for 40 years. Currently, more than 600,000 international students study in the UK (resulting in a potentially perilous dependence on this income stream for some institutions).

Moreover, the creativity that comes with financial pressures led UK universities, alongside innovative international partners, to develop the now familiar approach to transnational education (TNE). Arrangements such as articulations, franchises and validations make a UK higher education more accessible for international students.

But could that emerging interest in the mobility not just of people but of programmes be pushed a stage further? While foreign direct investment is well established as a business model in many sectors, its higher education manifestation – building campuses overseas – was an underdeveloped and niche activity. US institutions had a tradition of creating study centres overseas for their own students, and some had attempted a more traditional campus development in Japan in the 1980s. Beyond this, the idea of mobile institutions had few advocates before the turn of the millennium.

The late Sir Colin Campbell was one of those few.

In the late 1990s, when he was the University of Nottingham vice-chancellor, he worked with two other universities to explore a “British university in Thailand” and, unilaterally, a campus in Malaysia. The former became a casualty of the Asian financial crash of 1997-98, but the Malaysian project gained momentum, secured the support of the university’s senate and council and opened in September 2000.

It was a model soon to be replicated, when the University of Nottingham Ningbo China welcomed its first students in September 2004.

Colin Campbell’s vision made Nottingham the first British university to establish genuine international campuses. More than 20 years on, we are beyond proof of concept. It is an approach to internationalisation that opens new life chances for students in the host countries and beyond – and also offers exchange opportunities for students on Nottingham’s home campus. In addition, it has created opportunities for novel research partnerships and knowledge exchange, underpinned civic partnership both at home and overseas, and cemented Nottingham’s transition from a respectable but sleepy redbrick to a serious player on the global stage.

By now, there are believed to be more than 300 international campuses around the world – with about 50 established by UK universities. Most institutions, however, have opted for a broad-based strategy, with niche activities in a range of countries. Nottingham’s campus-based offer of a wide range of disciplines, underpinned by internationally competitive research activity, remains exceptional.

Does this mark out Nottingham’s approach to internationalisation as “of its time” – or maybe even a failed experiment?

Absolutely not. At one level, internationalisation in higher education is no different from that in banking or automotive manufacturing. Different modes of entry have different entry costs. Student recruitment is at the lowest end of the spectrum; establishing campuses is at the highest end, with other modes in between.

It follows that if short-term revenue generation is the priority, recruiting international students to home campuses is the way to go. The higher entry costs of the branch-campus approach include market research, civic engagement and partnership-building overseas. They also include consensus-building at home, not least around reputational risk. And that is all before a brick is laid. Once established, the ongoing maintenance costs of branch campuses are also much higher than the salaries of recruitment teams and commissions to international recruitment agencies.

So there are good reasons why the campus model is still relatively uncommon. But if the objective is the sort of long-term returns that universities are established for in the first place, establishing an international footprint remains the better course of action. Doing so can shape an institution’s staff and students to think differently about internationalisation, for instance. It can create a genuinely international alumni community. It can signal ambition to other partners. And it can leverage location for research and knowledge exchange activities.

This is the perspective that Colin Campbell embraced when he took Nottingham to Malaysia and China. Whether he caught a wave or created one is difficult to determine, but his innovative approach to international higher education has certainly transformed the institution he led for 20 years. And it has transformed everyone’s conception of the possibilities that internationalisation offers.

Christine Ennew is provost at the University of Warwick and was formerly provost and pro vice-chancellor of the University of Nottingham’s Malaysia campus. Sir David Greenaway is emeritus vice-chancellor and professor of economics at Nottingham.