Transnational education – The Shape of Things to Come

By Karen MacGregor. Transnational education is expanding at a “brisk pace”. But few countries are producing data or have strategies in place, and quality assurance and qualification recognition are weak, says a new British Council report. Still, three host countries – China, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates, or UAE – are successfully using transnational education to expand higher education access, boost academic capacity, develop domestic staff and-or train and retain a skilled workforce.

Other findings include that transnational education, or TNE, is still not a policy priority for many countries. While incentives to attract foreign universities were helping to drive activity, there were questions around sustainability in their absence, and TNE – especially branch campuses – was not attracting foreign direct investment. Further, there was a need for sending and host countries to together define transnational education, and the importance of a national TNE framework and institutional-level policies in host countries “cannot be overstated”.
The Shape of Things to Come – The evolution of transnational education: data, definitions, opportunities and impacts analysis was published last Thursday as the second volume in a series. Some of the top findings of the report were revealed at the British Council’s Going Global 2013 conference in March. The first volume, on higher education trends and emerging opportunities to 2020, predicted that growth in global student mobility would slow and overseas delivery of higher education would expand. More...