Universities, already encouraged to self-finance in the face of declining government funding, faced even more uncertainty when the pandemic hit. But few strayed from their strategy to monetise the growing global student market.
In the Netherlands, there is one international student for every four domestic students. Canada’s Immigration Refugee and Citizenship data shows that in 2015 to 2016 and 2019 to 2020, the number of Indian students studying there increased by 350 percent. Meanwhile, the UK’s Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) reported a 220 percent annual increase of Indian students enrolling in UK universities.
In Asia, many international programmes are provided by branches of UK universities. By 2021, there were 17 British universities in 27 countries around the world, providing education for approximately 60,000 students. The University of Nottingham Malaysia was opened in Selangor, Malaysia in 2000 catering to more than 5,000 students via the private university model. Newcastle University partnered with the Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) and created the Newcastle University International Singapore (NUIS) to offer medical degrees in Malaysia through NUMed. In 2006, the Xi’an Jiaoting-Liverpool University (XJTLU) was founded in Suzhou, China reaching approximately 14,000 students in 2019. It’s a trend that Adam Habib, Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London says is accelerating the brain drain in Africa and Asia, weakening their intellectual and institutional capacity to deal with the pandemic, climate change, and inequalities.
