Universities rethinking global expansion

By Mary Carmichael, Globe Staff. Pierre Du Jardin has infused his office at Suffolk University with the flavor of Senegal. Wooden masks hang on the walls, and Du Jardin’s soft accent evokes the official French language of the country. But if his 104 African students, all new to Boston this semester, do not feel quite at home on campus, it is hard to blame them.
They would not be here at all if Suffolk had not closed its branch campus in Senegal last spring. Suffolk closed the satellite campus after losing about $10 million on the venture. It would be far less expensive in the long run, the college figured, to move its Senegal students to Boston.
The shutdown is the latest of many. Over the last decade, universities spurred by dreams of global cachet - and, sometimes, by foreign governments eager to underwrite them - built or rented whole campuses and offered Western-style education abroad. But now some schools are running out of cash as they struggle to attract enough students and develop a viable business model.
“In the last 10 years, there was a gold-rush mentality,’’ said Jason Lane, who studies the phenomenon at the State University of New York at Albany. “Everyone was trying to start an international branch. But now the excitement is stalling.’’
The most spectacular collapse of an international branch campus happened last year, when Michigan State University, failing to recruit even one-fourth as many students as planned, pulled out of Dubai after just two years in business. George Mason University left the United Arab Emirates two years ago, before its inaugural class could graduate. Troy University has closed three branches in the past year, in Guam, Sri Lanka, and Germany. Texas Tech University plans to shutter its own German outpost by 2012. That is only the American schools. Some British and Australian colleges have closed branch campuses, too. More shutdowns are likely, said Joseph Aoun, president of Northeastern University, which has not founded an international campus.
“Universities are still new to globalization,’’ Aoun said. “We are going to see many experiments that fail.’’
A few leading US schools tried to establish foreign outposts decades ago. Harvard University founded a Chinese medical school in 1911 and a Swiss business program in 1973. Those early ventures were short-lived for reasons that are echoed today, said Jorge Dominguez, Harvard’s vice provost for international affairs.
“It was difficult to monitor the campus from thousands of miles away,’’ Dominguez said. “It was difficult to ensure that the education was the same quality. And costs were very high. Local people didn’t have the money to pay.’’
When Suffolk started its program in Senegal’s capital, Dakar, in 1999, 30 or so international branch campuses existed worldwide.