Transnational Higher Education in the 21st Century

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1 625148JSIXXX / Journal of Studies in International Education research-article2015 Special Issue Editorial Transnational Higher Education in the 21st Century Journal of Studies in International Education 2016, Vol. 20(1) European Association for International Education Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalspermissions.nav DOI: / jsi.sagepub.com Olawale lives in Nigeria and is enrolled in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) provided by Harvard University. Akmal lives in Malaysia and studies in the evenings at his local college, a private institute, following a degree program awarded by an Australian university. Smita is from India but she lives in Dubai, where her father works as a doctor. She studies at the international branch campus of a British university. All of these are examples of transnational higher education. Simply put, the term transnational education refers to study programs where learners are located in a country other than the one in which the awarding institution is based. In the latter half of the 20th century, the two most popular forms of transnational education were partner-supported delivery and distance education. Since the 1990s, the increased number of transnational students taking online programs has been facilitated by higher levels of computer ownership and access to the Internet. Although a handful of American universities established international branch campuses between the 1950s and 1990s, it was not until the start of the 21st century that the pace of development of these campuses accelerated. In August 2015, there were 235 international branch campuses operating worldwide and a further 23 were planned or under development (Cross-Border Education Research Team, 2015). Although the United States is the largest source country of international branch campuses, the United Kingdom, Australia, France, and Russia are also major players in the transnational higher education market. Although countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom provide official statistics relating to transnational higher education, such data are not available on a global basis. Hence, it is not possible to know exactly how many students are enrolled in transnational higher education programs worldwide. In , 63 U.K. higher education institutions had 323,730 active enrollments on 2,785 transnational programs, which generated a total of 495.8m in revenue (Mellors-Bourne, Fielden, Kemp, Middlehurst, & Woodfield, 2014). In the same year, there were 110,116 students enrolled on Australian transnational higher education programs, which represented 33.5% of the international students in Australian higher education (Australian Department for Education, 2014). Although the early players in the transnational higher education market originated in Anglophone countries, the last few years have seen many institutions from non-anglophone countries entering this market (Wilkins & Urbanovič, 2014). Many governments globally have been keen to encourage the growth of transnational higher education, as this presents an opportunity to expand higher education capacity at no, or relatively little, cost to the public budget. Other potential benefits

2 4 Journal of Studies in International Education 20(1) include improved skills levels among the labor force, increased innovation, reduced brain drain, lower unemployment, higher gross domestic product (GDP), and reduced currency outflows, resulting from fewer nationals studying abroad. Some countries notably Malaysia, Singapore, and the Emirate of Dubai have worked hard to position themselves as regional higher education hubs that attract incoming international students. China is another country that has been keen to encourage transnational higher education. For example, Article 3 of the 2003 Regulations of the People s Republic of China on Chinese-Foreign Cooperation in Running Schools encourages Chinese higher education institutions to cooperate and form partnerships with high-quality foreign institutions. In June 2015, a total of 64 transnational higher education institutions were operating in China, offering more than 1,000 programs (Chinese Ministry of Education, 2015a, 2015b). In terms of student enrollments, two of the most successful international branch campuses globally are located in China. According to the institutions websites, in , Xi an Jiaotong-Liverpool University had more than 8,000 registered students and the University of Nottingham Ningbo had more than 6,000 students, including more than 100 on doctoral programs. At least a further 1,000 foreign institutions have some other kind of collaborative agreement in China. China s impressive economic growth and the unsatisfied demand for higher education make the country an attractive location for transnational operations. However, the establishment of international branch campuses is not permitted unless undertaken with a local institution. Although the Ministry of Education (and its predecessor, the State Education Commission) issued Regulations in 1995, 2003, and 2004, the specific selection criteria used to grant approval for the establishment of a transnational campus have never been explicitly stated. In this special issue, He (2016) attempts to identify the policy changes of the Chinese government between 1995 and 2004, which potentially provides useful findings for foreign institutions considering or intending to open a campus in China. He concludes that transnational campuses are more likely to be approved if the foreign university is highly ranked, if the foreign university is affiliated with a Chinese institution rather than taking legal person status, and if it offers programs in subjects that contribute to the country s industrial development, such as information technology, science, and engineering. Wilkins and Huisman (2012) used institutional theory to explain how regulative, normative, and cultural structures and processes influence the transnational strategies of higher education institutions. It is the legislation, rules, and regulations that comprise the regulative frame that likely has the most influence over institutional decision making. In another of this special issue s contributions, Amaral, Tavares, Cardoso, and Sin (2016) analyze how different contexts and levels of regulation in three Portuguesespeaking countries influence the transnational activities of higher education institutions with different organizational identities. Amaral et al. found that normative forces and a high degree of isomorphism led public universities to shun transnational activities such as franchising and international branch campuses. In contrast, the newer public polytechnics, with their malleable identities, were more prepared to operate

3 Special Issue Editorial 5 abroad and cope with the different regulatory frames in different (Portuguese-speaking) countries. The diverse sets of regulative, normative, and cultural structures and processes that exist in different countries each present institutions offering transnational education with a unique set of challenges and risks. In this special issue, Healey (2016) reports the results of a qualitative study into the lived experiences of branch campus managers in China, Malaysia, and the United Arab Emirates. It was found that these managers have to deal with alien commercial and cultural contexts, and that the biggest challenge facing them is satisfying the competing demands of a range of internal and external stakeholders. Another interesting finding was that few of the managers at international branch campuses had previous management experience at their institution s home country campus. Healey concludes that institutions should better prepare and support the managers who run international branch campuses. As transnational higher education has grown and spread globally during the last two decades, so too has the interest in it among researchers. The fact that this special issue attracted 22 submissions, the majority of which were interesting and of high quality, provides evidence of this. In fact, in this special issue, Kosmützky and Putty (2016) argue that a new thematic field of research has emerged, which encompasses the terms transnational, offshore, cross-border, and borderless higher education. Using these four terms as key search words, they identified a total of 1,931 publications. In 2000, conference papers accounted for the highest number of publications in this thematic field, but by 2010, journals had become the most popular means of disseminating research on transnational higher education, with the Journal of Studies in International Education being the top journal for publishing full-length academic style articles (Kosmützky & Putty, 2016). It is also interesting to note that in 2014, the number of student theses concerned with research on transnational education was greater than the total number of books and conference papers combined. If some of the students researching transnational higher education proceed to pursue academic or research careers, we could see a further mushrooming of research in this thematic field in the years ahead. Being a relatively new field of research, a proliferation of terms and definitions have emerged in response to the new actors, new partnerships, new modes of delivery, and new regulations that have appeared, which has caused a degree of confusion among researchers. For example, the papers by Kosmützky and Putty (2016) and Knight (2016) both note that researchers often use the terms transnational, offshore, cross-border, and borderless higher education interchangeably, even though there are important differences in meaning among these terms. In the fifth contribution to this special issue, Knight argues the need for a common set of categories and definitions for use by researchers and those compiling statistics on transnational higher education, and she proposes a framework that includes descriptive notes to provide these. If adopted, this framework might allow different modes of transnational higher education activities to be examined in terms of similarities and differences for both application and research purposes.

4 6 Journal of Studies in International Education 20(1) Transnational higher education has evolved rapidly during the last two decades and no one can know for sure how the sector will develop or change during the next 20 years. A survey conducted by the European Association for International Education (EAIE) in 2015 found that opening new international branch campuses is now the lowest internationalization priority among European universities, behind things such as strategic partnerships and student mobility. This led some commentators to immediately conclude that international branch campus development has become unfashionable and that it is now past its peak. However, it might just be that the existing markets are currently saturated, and as social, economic, and regulatory conditions change globally, branch campus development might again accelerate, but in new countries and regions such as India, Africa, and Latin America. Furthermore, we do not know how MOOCs will change and whether they will gain popularity to the extent that they affect physical enrollments. One thing is certain: There will be plenty of changes in transnational higher education over the next 20 years to keep researchers busy. Stephen Wilkins Plymouth University, UK Guest Editor References Amaral, A., Tavares, O., Cardoso, S., & Sin, C. (2016). Shifting institutional boundaries through cross-border higher education. Journal of Studies in International Education, 20, Australian Department for Education. (2014). Research snapshot: Transnational education in the higher education sector. Retrieved from Research-Snapshots/Documents/Transnational%20education_HE_2013.pdf Cross-Border Education Research Team. (2015). Quick facts: Cross-Border Education Research Team. Retrieved from Chinese Ministry of Education. (2015a). Master degree or Sino-foreign cooperative education institutions and projects (including the Mainland and Hong Kong and Taiwan cooperative education institutions and projects) list. Retrieved from php/default/approval/orglists/1 Chinese Ministry of Education. (2015b). Undergraduate Sino-foreign cooperative education institutions and projects (including the Mainland and Hong Kong and Taiwan cooperative education institutions and projects) list. Retrieved from php/default/approval/orglists/2 He, L. (2016). Transnational higher education institutions in China: A comparison of policy orientation and reality. Journal of Studies in International Education, 20, Healey, N. (2016). The challenges of leading an international branch campus: The lived experience of in-country senior managers. Journal of Studies in International Education, 20, Knight, J. (2016). Transnational education remodeled: Towards a common TNE framework and definitions. Journal of Studies in International Education, 20, Kosmützky, A., & Putty, R. (2016). Transcending borders and traversing boundaries: A systematic review of the literature on transnational, offshore, cross-border and borderless higher education. Journal of Studies in International Education, 20, 8-33.

5 Special Issue Editorial 7 Mellors-Bourne, R., Fielden, J., Kemp, N., Middlehurst, R., & Woodfield, S. (2014). The value of transnational education to the UK (BIS Research Paper Number 194). London, England: Department for Business, Innovation & Skills. Wilkins, S., & Huisman, J. (2012). The international branch campus as transnational strategy in higher education. Higher Education, 64, Wilkins, S., & Urbanovič, J. (2014). English as the lingua franca in transnational higher education: Motives and prospects of institutions that teach in languages other than English. Journal of Studies in International Education, 18,