Root and Branch
Among the many thousands of types of cross-border educational collaborations, the international branch campus (IBC) is the most substantial and elaborate, but it can also be the best way for a university to successfully achieve its enrollment, internationalization, and other goals.
According to the Cross-Border Education Research Team (C-BERT), led by researchers at the Pennsylvania State University and the University at Albany-SUNY, there are 249 IBCs currently in operation around the world, serving more than 180,000 students. Following a big boom in Middle East campuses during the late 1980s through the first decade of the 2000s, a 2016 report by Richard Garrett, Kevin Kinser, Jason E. Lane, and Rachael Merola published by the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education shows that East Asia is now clearly the center of gravity for the next wave of expansion, and China has overtaken the United Arab Emirates as the host country with the largest number of IBCs (32 versus 31). “The overall condition of the global IBC market remains healthy and growing,” the report says.
Currently, 32 countries have established campuses in 75 host countries, according to Kevin Kinser and Jason E. Lane in a 2016 International Higher Education article. The two authors note that since the first IBCs opened in the 1950s, only 27 IBCs—about 10 percent of the current population of overseas campuses—have closed down operations, a notably low failure rate when stacked up against the very high failure rates associated with entrepreneurial start-ups in other sectors.
