International Branch Campuses: Why Global North leads and Global South hosts?

The race for establishing International Branch Campuses (IBCs) is accelerating. In 2006, there were 130 such campuses worldwide. By 2026, that number reached 386, around a 200% increase in the last two decades. The largest exporters are United States, United Kingdom, Russia, France, and Australia. The biggest importers include China, UAE, Uzbekistan, Malaysia, and Singapore.

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Together, the U.S., U.K., France, and Australia account for more than 50% of IBCs globally. While a handful of campuses originate from India, China, and Japan, their presence remains marginal. The flow is clear: Western universities expand into Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Global North leads. Global South hosts.

Eagerness to expand

Two apparent reasons. One is entrepreneurial. The other is epistemological.

Western universities have long depended on international student tuition to subsidise their operations. Alongside reduced government funding, their domestic student populations have been shrinking because of falling birth rates for decades.

Meanwhile, the young population in the Global South is increasing. More than half the world’s student-age population now lives in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Millions of students hungry for foreign degrees travel from South to North every year. Millions of students find it difficult to migrate because of the higher cost of living abroad.

Western institutions see this largely untapped marketplace as a profitable opportunity. Branch campuses allow them to seize this opportunity and expand their revenue generation system without the expense of bringing students abroad. Simple market logic. If you cannot afford to reach the grocery store, they will deliver to your door, and delivery charges will be folded into the tuition fee. This is the gift of academic capitalism, where education is treated as a commodity in the free market, and universities are compelled to function like commercial enterprises to survive.

Epistemologically, the West considers itself a reference point for the rest of the world. They have constructed an epistemological hierarchy in the world, where Western knowledge, institutions, and ideas are considered superior and non-Western are seen as inferior. Using this epistemic power, they do not just export IBCs. They export the idea that education, to count, must come from the West. They expect the world to emulate Western institutions, rankings, and practices to reach the ideal standard. These dynamics echo colonial rule, when non-Western people were portrayed as uncivilized; therefore, conquering and re-educating them was legitimized.

Although most Global South countries were freed from direct colonialism after World War II, this epistemic violence remains prevalent within them.

Western curricula set standards. Western accreditation defines quality. Western journals dominate citation indices. Western frameworks define the rankings.

To maintain this epistemological superiority, the Global North continues to dominate the academic world, including The Transnational Education. IBCs are both a product of this epistemological hegemony and a mechanism for extending it. This time, they do not arrive as conquerors. They arrive as brands. And they are welcomed.

Why Global South welcomes IBCs

The Global South welcomes IBCs largely because the West’s epistemic power has produced a condition of epistemic dependency for them. Institutions in the Global South measure their worth against Western rankings such as THE and QS. Student outcomes are assessed through Western-designed tests like PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS. Researchers evaluate themselves through citation counts, impact factors, h-index, i10-index, and publication in prestigious Western journals.

People in the Global South often believe that real quality education requires either going to Europe or America, or inviting them home. There is a structural preference for foreign credentials: hiring decisions routinely favour Western degrees over local ones. When a society accepts the idea that its own knowledge is inferior to foreign knowledge, welcoming foreign campuses no longer appears as submission, but as progress and opportunity. This is how epistemological hegemony reproduces itself, not through force, but through desire.

Above all, host countries hope to reduce brain drain. The Global South loses several million students annually to foreign universities with billions of dollars in foreign exchange. These are often the country’s brightest young people, and many do not return. Even if there are remittances, they rarely compensate for the loss of talent, skills, and innovation. The calculation behind hosting branch campuses is simple: If you cannot stop students from going abroad for a foreign degree, at least keep them, their spending and intellectual energy at home.

But does it work?

IBCs typically operate with full autonomy from host-nation regulators and deep loyalty to the parent institution’s priorities. They reflect the educational programmes of the sponsoring university, not the host country. They favour Western educational models over local knowledge systems.

The very architecture of the IBC – standardised curriculum, western languages as the primary medium of instruction, selective curricula that take neither local knowledge nor local context into consideration, and easy credit-transfer pathways – points outward by design.

The result? IBCs produce graduates who are better equipped to solve problems elsewhere than at home. The campus that was supposed to reduce brain drain quietly accelerates it. Students use IBCs as a stepping stone for further study or employment overseas. The intellectual energy of South is directed towards North.

More damagingly, when IBCs treat local intellectual traditions at the periphery, the result is not just an outward-looking graduate. This causes Epistemicide, the slow suicide of local ways of knowing, not through violence, but through the prestige of foreign credentials.

The way forward

The Global South cannot afford to shun away from hosting IBCs completely. Isolation from global engagement would hamper its progress. Neither can it afford to accept foreign knowledge uncritically at the cost of its own intellectual traditions. The challenge, therefore, is not to choose between global and local, but to reject the false premise that they are in conflict.

What does this mean in practice? IBCs must integrate global disciplinary standards with local knowledge traditions, not as elective add-ons, but as core content. Local educators must be empowered as genuine partners in curriculum development, not mere deliverers of standardised modules designed elsewhere. A meaningful share of IBCs research activity should address questions of local relevance, in partnership with domestic institutions. Graduate outcome data, including emigration rates, must be published, scrutinised, and tied to institutional accountability.

This is not protectionism. It is to embrace epistemic plurality, to recognise multiple ways of knowing, rather than privileging dominant narratives from the Global North.

It is entirely reasonable to expect that institutions operating on the soil of a sovereign nation should be genuinely accountable to its educational goals. Granting IBCs unconditional autonomy and leaving them unattended without guardrails is not liberal hospitality. It is negligence with generational consequences. The Global South has borne such consequences before; it should be wiser this time.

(The author holds a Doctorate in Educational Policy from NIEPA. Currently associated with National Council for Teacher Education. Views expressed are personal)