Branch campuses produce business leaders, not research

By Grace Karram. Canada’s University of Waterloo announced this autumn that it will close its Dubai campus after only three years of operation. The withdrawal is due to financial uncertainty as a result of low student enrolment.
But the university does not plan to withdraw entirely from the region; it will stay in the United Arab Emirates, but with a redefined role. According to one report, this revamped agenda may focus on “research linkages and graduate studies”.
Research and graduate education are anything but a new role for Western institutions like Waterloo. For decades, a large portion of university internationalisation has happened in these sectors. Returning to these mainstays may not be a viable fallback option for globally aspiring universities that want to compete in the world’s high-paced education hubs.
Waterloo’s dilemma has been shared by about a dozen Western universities that have established campuses in emerging economies only to pull out later when the programmes were not as lucrative as anticipated. The majority of these are long-established Western universities with rich traditions of research and scholarship. Read more...