Saturday, January 19, 2013

Are international branch campuses problematic?

When I was in Sri Lanka I was intrigued to see a few obscure universities from Australia and the UK were setting up programs offering degrees there. Of course the large advertising billboards claimed how "world class" they were.

At the other end of the prestige scale, I was interested to read an article in the Economist Foreign Universities find working in China harder than they expected. It points out how Yale abandoned a joint program with Peking University. One of the reasons may have been concerns about rampant plagiarism.

A number of Australian universities have lost serious money (and face) in failed ventures in Asia. Some of the issues are discussed here.

One should never under-estimate two very powerful forces
- culture
- financial greed.

The latter tends to lead to wishful thinking which overlooks the role of the first.

1 comment:

  1. Do you get prestige by association? I mean, is Yale's campus in Singapore automatically more prestigious than places much less prestigious than Yale?

    By prestigious, I mean would it be good for your cv to do a PhD or postdoc there. Not as much as a Yale postdoc, of course, but more than say... I don't know who to pick on... UQ?

    I realise this has nothing to do with the post.

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