Addressing regional priorities

The obvious shared characteristic is that they are working with the grain of host government priorities and seeking to alleviate systemic problems.

The high number of Indian students seeking overseas education is partly due to the limited capacity, particularly for academic high achievers, within the home-grown higher education sector of the world’s most populous nation. In August 2024, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi highlighted the need ‘to build such an education system in India that youngsters do not need to go abroad to study. In fact, we would want foreign students to come here and study’. One aspect of India’s comprehensive National Education Policy is the drive to expand higher education capacity (and attract international students) by encouraging prestigious foreign universities to establish campuses in India, precisely as Southampton is doing.

In Africa, universities have long struggled to retain emerging researchers within their home continent. There has been growing awareness in the UK of imbalanced relationships with African universities when it comes to research funding, and the huge impact this can have on societies as a result of brain drain. Professor Majid Ezzati, the academic director of Imperial Global Ghana, sees the hub as an opportunity to establish equitable partnerships between researchers in the UK and West Africa. The intention is to ‘help develop an ecosystem that means researchers feel “they’re not taking a hit to their career” by remaining on the continent’, while also boosting economic development and research in the region.

Seeking multi-faceted engagement

Another point the two initiatives have in common is that they are not conceived in narrow terms. 

Although the driver for Imperial’s hub in Ghana is research collaboration, the plan is that it will be used to support economic development not only through science and technology research, but also through education and entrepreneurship activities.

And, while Southampton’s campus in India is firmly positioned as an educational facility, it is ‘expected to focus on research as well as teaching, particularly into topics relevant to south Asia, including air quality and food security’. The location of the campus was chosen in part for its ‘proximity to Indian companies, start-ups and multinational organisations’.

Part of a broader strategy

Both universities have entered into development of these new international outposts as part of a deliberate strategy. They are positioned as ‘one in a series’.

Southampton has an established campus in Malaysia and has ‘made opening new bases around the world part of its core strategy’. Beyond India, it ‘currently has a shortlist of five locations, with a plan to open two additional campuses by 2030’.

Imperial has explicitly stated that overseas campuses are not part of its business model, making the case that research centres offer a more sustainable alternative.

It opened its first overseas research centre in Singapore (Imperial Global Singapore) at the beginning of 2024 ‘as part of a “more strategic approach” to international collaboration’. This was followed by the launch of a California tech hub in San Francisco (Imperial Global USA) in October, designed to ‘”supercharge” science and technology collaborations between British and US partners’. The Ghana operation is the most recent in the series.

Not driven by a profit motive (but not exactly altruistic)

Neither project is driven by the desire for short-term financial gain. Given the financial pressures facing the UK higher education sector at the moment, ventures on this scale are very much the preserve of wealthier institutions.

That’s not to say that the motivation is altruistic.

Southampton’s Vice-President for international and engagement, Professor Andrew Atherton, notes that, while the India campus is ‘not a money-making venture’ and is not expected to make money in the short term, ‘over time “the numbers have to stack up”’.

In a recent THE article on transnational education, Steve Thomas highlights the ‘dual motivations of global presence and income generation’ that drive most UK TNE engagement. He suggests that ‘financial imperatives are becoming more integral to the discussion, at least in private’, and urges universities to ‘confront the reality of their motivations honestly’ to avoid muddled strategy.  

Imperial’s focus on research collaboration builds on a track record of local partnering, which it is now setting out to do on a larger scale and with clearer strategic intent. While each of its overseas hubs will have a different flavour depending on local context and opportunities, they will all act as platforms for regional collaboration and enhanced regional impact.

Different institutional responses to the same question

Such significant long-term investments reflect quite different institutional responses on the part of the two universities to the same question.

What does it mean to be a global institution at a time of geopolitical uncertainty and shifting international student flows?

Other institutions will come up with their own responses.

To be successful, these must be aligned with institutional mission, values and resources. And they must form part of a coherent and openly articulated strategy that staff and other stakeholders understand, support and have confidence in.

Tags/Keywords

INTERNATIONAL CAMPUS RESEARCH COLLABORATION GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT INSTITUTIONAL STRATEGY

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