When TNE goes wrong, it’s students that suffer
So, the latest rush to gold is that “universities must maximise the opportunities and expand abroad” – the message from Skills Minister Jacqui Smith on LBC back in January.
Like so many initiatives before it, the thrust in the new International Education Strategy runs the risk of happening in a context of financial desperation, light regulation, a set of coming scandals and recriminations later.
Because whatever else anyone tells me about TNE, nobody’s intending to make a loss on it, are they?
We hear a lot about the opportunities, but little mention of what happens to students when these ventures go wrong. And they go wrong a lot.
The Cross-Border Education Research Team reported that of the international branch campuses tracked globally, roughly one in five has opened and closed – 73 failures against 387 currently operating. It’s a failure rate that in any other consumer market would trigger regulatory intervention.
So before the rush to £40 billion begins in earnest, it’s worth cataloguing what’s actually happened to students when the “maximise the opportunities and expand abroad” model hits reality. None of these are UK examples – but every one of them involves the kind of cross-border provision the minister is now championing.
Five months and out
One of the most spectacular TNE failures on record remains the University of New South Wales Asia campus in Singapore. Inside Higher Ed reported that it opened in March 2007 and announced closure by June – five months of operation. The campus enrolled just 148 students, and they learned of the closure with minimal warning.
One student who had given up a place at the National University of Singapore was left with what the GlobalHigherEd blog described as an “unaffordable promise to study in Australia.” Students petitioned to keep the campus open and offered to pay full fees – they were rejected.
UNSW lost $15 million and repaid $22 million to the Singapore government, and while students were offered places in Sydney with scholarships, many couldn’t relocate – they’d chosen Singapore for a reason.
What would have prevented this? Any serious due diligence on market demand before launch, a mandatory student protection plan with compensation arrangements triggered by early closure, and regulatory requirements for minimum financial reserves to fund teach-out. Singapore subsequently tightened its regulatory framework for private education providers – but only after the horse had bolted.
The Gulf collapse
Michigan State University opened its Dubai campus in 2008, and Inside Higher Ed reported that it discontinued undergraduate programmes by 2010 – enrolling just 85 students against a projected 400. The National reported that more than 100 undergraduates and 24 staff were affected.
Students were given the option to transfer to East Lansing, Michigan – but many had chosen Dubai precisely because they couldn’t or didn’t want to study in the US. Those who stayed had to find alternative providers willing to accept their credits, with no guarantee of recognition.
This wasn’t an isolated case. Inside Higher Ed reported that George Mason University’s campus in Ras al Khaimah also closed in 2009 following sponsor and financial disputes, with students losing their local route to completion. And the closures fed on each other – contemporary reporting noted that when George Mason closed, it made students at other Gulf campuses more sceptical about institutional commitment, accelerating the recruitment problems that brought down other ventures.
The New York Institute of Technology similarly phased out operations in both Bahrain and Jordan, with Al Bawaba reporting on the Bahrain shutdown and NYIT’s US accreditor formally recording the closure and teach-out requirement for the Amman campus.
The pattern across all of these is the same – institutions made enrolment projections that turned out to be wildly optimistic, opened campuses without the financial resilience to survive a slow start, and when the numbers didn’t materialise, it was students who bore the cost of disrupted studies and forced transfers.
The fix wouldn’t have been complicated – mandatory student number viability testing before launch, ring-fenced closure funds held in escrow from day one, and regulated teach-out obligations that actually guarantee equivalent local provision, not just “you can always move to Michigan.”
Behind closed doors
Two of the most significant recent cases involve decisions made about students rather than with them. AP reported that in February 2024, the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents voted 7–1 to close the university’s Qatar campus – a campus that had been operating for over 20 years and graduated more than 1,500 students.
Inside Higher Ed reported that the decision was made “behind closed doors” without public discussion, and staff were informed via a 1am email at the start of a weekend. The student government president called it a “major betrayal” and a “slap in the face.”
Staff told reporters:
Students can’t understand how local Texan politics can unilaterally determine a weighty decision about a very successful campus that excels in education without any discussion or negotiation.
Only the single governor who voted to keep the campus open had actually visited it.
The Yale-NUS College closure in Singapore followed a similar governance pattern. The Yale Daily News reported that in August 2021, the National University of Singapore unilaterally decided to merge Yale-NUS into a new college structure and end the Yale affiliation, with no consultation with faculty, senior administrators, or students.
Channel News Asia reported that students learned via press reports ten minutes before a town hall. Yale administrators were reportedly surprised by NUS’s decision but had no mechanism to prevent it, and students who had chosen a distinctive liberal arts model found their institution hollowed out beneath them as faculty departed, courses changed, and the original educational promise evaporated.
What would have prevented this? Governance structures that give students and staff a formal voice in closure or restructuring decisions, contractual protections that prevent unilateral partner action, and regulatory requirements for genuine consultation before any institution can cease admissions. In neither case did students have any power to influence the decision that fundamentally altered their education.
Not worth the paper
If campus closures are the most visible failure mode, accreditation collapse is the most miserable. The Malay Mail and other outlets reported that Malaysia’s Qualification Agency revoked accreditation for multiple programmes at Limkokwing University, affecting over 800 foreign and local students.
Students reported:
The physical paper that we will graduate with will have the value of a piece of paper, literally.
International students couldn’t apply for jobs because their qualifications weren’t accepted in home countries, credits couldn’t be transferred, and PhD students mandated to complete in three years rather than the typical four to five were forced to leave the country when they couldn’t finish in time.
The for-profit chain Raffles Education Corporation was an even more systemic version of the same problem. Joana Kompa, a former senior lecturer, documented how in 2015 the Australian Federal Court found that Raffles College of Design and Commerce did “not have the clearly demonstrated capacity to provide education of a satisfactory standard,” and TEQSA revoked its accreditation.
More than 1,000 students across campuses in Bangalore, Bangkok, Colombo, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Mumbai, New Delhi, Shanghai, Singapore, and Ulaanbaatar were affected. Before this, Kompa reported, Raffles had been operating in Thailand without a proper legal licence – an accusation that proved true, with the company quoted in local newspapers as a rogue provider.
And then there’s the extreme end – provision that was never legitimate at all. News From the States reported on litigation involving Stratford University, in which a court filing alleged that an overseas partner had enrolled Kurdish students in an “unauthorised branch campus” without the university’s approval, and that students were notified the coursework offered was “unauthorised and unaccredited.”
Czech Radio reported criminal charges involving entities in the Czech Republic presenting themselves as foreign universities and marketing to students from India, Bangladesh, and Nepal – students paying for study that had no legal status, discovering they were in a two-room facility with no recognition, no valid visa basis, and no route to a qualification.
The protections that would have caught these cases are obvious enough – pre-enrolment disclosure requirements so students know the accreditation status and regulatory standing of their programme before they commit, mandatory checks that provision is licensed in the host country and not just accredited in the home country, and real-time public registers of accreditation status that students can actually find. In every one of these cases, the information asymmetry between institution and student was the mechanism of harm.
Speak freely?
Some TNE ventures don’t collapse – they just don’t deliver what the brand implies. The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre documented how the Nardello & Co investigation into NYU Abu Dhabi found that NYU’s labour guidelines failed to protect 10,000 of the 30,000 workers who built the campus, that an estimated 25,000 workers paid recruitment fees as high as $3,000 and were never reimbursed, and that at least 200 workers were deported for striking.
The Coalition for Fair Labor at NYU – a faculty-student alliance – argued:
The university likely permitted forced labor conditions for thousands of workers in construction of its campus.
The student who did most to expose conditions, Kristina Bogos, was subsequently placed on a Gulf Cooperation Council blacklist and denied entry to Qatar.
Inside Higher Ed reported that Northwestern University’s Qatar campus cancelled an event featuring an openly gay musician, and that faculty found the university pushing language suggesting academic freedom protections only applied “to the extent that applicable laws allow” – a significant caveat in a country where homosexuality is criminalised.
Staff across Education City in Qatar reported self-censorship, with one telling researchers that:
…there are certain lines that really can’t be crossed, and they are invisible to you until you cross them.
The American Association of University Professors warned:
In a host environment where free speech is constrained, if not proscribed, faculty will censor themselves, and the cause of authentic liberal education, to the extent it can exist in such situations, will suffer.
A responsible regulatory framework would have required pre-enrolment disclosure of the legal environment students will be studying in, including restrictions on speech, assembly, and identity that apply in the host jurisdiction.
Students enrolling on a degree bearing a Western university’s brand have a reasonable expectation that the educational experience – including the freedom to research, debate, and express themselves – will be broadly equivalent. When it isn’t, that’s a material misrepresentation, and unlike a campus closure, it’s one that’s entirely foreseeable at the point the partnership is signed.
Extraction economics
Laureate International Universities – at its peak the world’s largest for-profit higher education network with over a million students across 30 countries – illustrates a different failure mode entirely. CNBC reported that after Laureate took over Centro Universitario IBMR in Brazil in 2010, the school’s quality ranking among small colleges plunged from 41st to 132nd, with the Rio State Legislature criticising for-profit colleges for firing professors.
Chile’s National Accreditation Commission stripped accreditation from Laureate’s Universidad de Las Americas, and by 2020, University World News reported that Laureate was pulling out of Chile entirely, having owned five universities catering for 14 per cent of the country’s students.
Meanwhile in South Africa, Monash University sold its campus to the private Advtech group in 2019 – the reason being low profitability and low enrolment numbers – and prior to the sale, Monash had sidelined the South African campus on its official websites and didn’t refer to it as a “campus.”
Students enrolled at what they understood to be an Australian university campus found the institution sold to a domestic for-profit provider, with their Monash-branded qualification issued under teach-out arrangements by the new owner.
The missing protection here is treating change of ownership or institutional control as a material change requiring student consent or an opt-out with compensation. Students chose these institutions – they didn’t choose the entities that subsequently acquired them.
And regulatory frameworks need to distinguish between expanding access and extracting profit, because the minister’s pitch about “giving more students access to a UK education on their own doorsteps” sounds different when the doorstep in question is staffed by the cheapest available tutors and the university’s primary relationship is with the cash.
What to ask first
If the government is going to encourage millions more people to study for UK degrees overseas, it’s worth thinking about what those students should be asking – and what they’re almost certainly not being told.
For each aspect of the student experience – academic teaching, welfare support, democratic representation – TNE arrangements typically fall into one of three categories – identical to the home campus, functionally equivalent but differently delivered, or just absent. The trouble is that marketing materials almost never make that distinction clear, and students are left to discover which category their particular experience falls into only after they’ve enrolled and paid.
One aspect concerns accreditation. A degree awarded by a UK university doesn’t automatically confer the right to practise in the country where it was studied. Professional accreditation in fields like engineering, law, or medicine may require additional local registration that a UK qualification alone won’t satisfy.
The Limkokwing and Raffles cases show what happens at the extreme end – qualifications revoked or found worthless in the host jurisdiction – but even in less dramatic cases, students in regulated professions need to know before enrolment whether their award will actually let them do what they’re training to do. If the institution can’t answer that question clearly, that’s a red flag.
What happens if this campus or partnership closes? Every case above involved students who had no idea their institution might shut, merge, or withdraw until it was already happening. TNE students generally can’t access UK student finance, and there’s often little available locally – meaning they’re bearing the full financial risk with no safety net.
Is there a student protection plan? Is there a ring-fenced fund for teach-out? What are students’ options if the partner institution or the UK university pulls out? If the answer is vague or nonexistent, the student is being asked to bet their education on institutional goodwill.
What support actually exists there – and who provides it? Mental health support, disability provision, and career services are some of the areas of greatest variation in TNE. Some are delivered through local partnerships, some are digital-only versions of home campus services, and some simply don’t exist.
Disability support is a particular concern – legal frameworks, cultural attitudes, and available resources vary dramatically between countries, and what constitutes a reasonable adjustment in one jurisdiction may not exist as a concept in another. Responsible partnerships might ask not just “is there a counselling service” but “who runs it, what language does it operate in, what are its hours, and what happens if students need something that isn’t available locally?”
Can students actually say what they think? This is the question that almost nobody asks before enrolling, and the one that matters most for the integrity of the educational experience. The cases from Qatar, the UAE, and China all demonstrate that academic freedom in TNE contexts can be constrained in ways that fundamentally alter what a degree means.
Lots of LGBT+ advocacy could constitute illegal activity under local law, affecting both curriculum content and student activities – one case involved a staff member admitting the university provided little protection and that students “tried to keep it secret.” Students enrolling on a degree that bears a university’s brand are entitled to know, before they commit, what they can’t research, can’t discuss, and can’t be. If the institution’s answer is “academic freedom applies to the extent that applicable laws allow,” students should understand that this is a significant caveat, not a reassurance.
TNE students often fall between representative structures – simultaneously represented by the local institution’s students’ association, the UK university’s union, or neither. Even where membership rights technically exist, immigration constraints can create a two-tier membership system where TNE students may hold voting rights and participate in democracy but remain structurally excluded from the highest levels of SU leadership.
Time zones, language barriers, and cultural differences in how representation works compound the problem. Universities might ask – who do students complain to if something goes wrong? Is there a local representative structure? Does the UK university’s complaints process actually apply to them? The Office of the Independent Adjudicator has extended its scheme to TNE students in England and Wales – but enforcement across jurisdictions remains, as the explainer puts it, “unclear.”
Will a student’s degree and experience be truly “equivalent”? This is the question institutions are most reluctant to answer honestly. In theory, a UK degree is a UK degree regardless of where it was studied. In practice, the QAA’s own research found that of 11 British branch campuses examined in the UAE, only two met the definition of “campus” – the rest were “little more than an office and teaching rooms.”
If the learning environment, the staff qualifications, the library access, and the peer group are all substantially different from the home campus, the degree may carry the same certificate but not the same experience or – in the eyes of some employers – the same credibility. Students deserve to know the difference between “this is the same degree” and “this is the same piece of paper.”
Some branch campuses do deliver genuinely excellent provision, and some partnership arrangements give students access to educational opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise exist.
But the information asymmetry between institution and student is the mechanism of harm in almost every failure case documented above. The minimum viable student protection isn’t a regulatory framework that catches problems after they’ve happened – it’s a disclosure regime that gives students the information they need to make a genuine choice before they enrol.
The strategy’s gap
The minister says she wants “millions more people around the world to experience the exceptional UK education system and to carry those values into leadership, business and public life.” That’s a fine aspiration. But the track record of international education ventures – including those run by universities from countries with strong domestic quality assurance – suggests that “expand abroad” without “protect students abroad” is a recipe for reputational and human damage.
Across every case, the student harms are remarkably consistent – study disrupted or terminated without warning, qualifications not recognised, credits non-transferable, academic freedom compromised without disclosure, governance decisions made without consultation, and financial losses with no effective route to redress. In every case, the information the student needed to protect themselves either didn’t exist, wasn’t disclosed, or was actively obscured.
If the UK government is serious about TNE as a growth industry, the International Education Strategy should develop mandatory student protection plans for all TNE provision with ring-fenced closure funds, pre-enrolment disclosure of host country regulatory status, accreditation standing, and any legal restrictions on academic freedom, governance requirements that give students a formal voice in restructuring or closure decisions, real-time public registers of the accreditation and regulatory status of every programme delivered under a UK university’s name anywhere in the world, and a complaints and compensation mechanism that actually works across borders.
Without those, “maximise the opportunities and expand abroad” is a promise to institutions and their balance sheets, not to the students who’ll be carrying the risk.
