In the face of challenges at home, universities embrace “Global Britain”
In the face of challenges at home, universities embrace “Global Britain”.
The UK’s transnational education (TNE) expansion, particularly in India, has been generating significant attention in the higher education sector, with agreements in Egypt, and Indonesia, also reported in the press. Under normal circumstances, such developments would be welcomed, but in light of widespread restructuring and redundancies across UK universities, this simultaneous celebration of overseas expansion appears, at best, insensitive and, at worst, callous.
Despite the enthusiasm surrounding TNE, it is not a guaranteed solution for increasing university revenue, as evidenced by the University of Reading’s experience. In June 2019, Reading drastically scaled back its Malaysia campus in an effort to make it sustainable after incurring multimillion-pound losses. Vincenzo Raimo, the university’s pro vice-chancellor of global engagement at the time, stated that the campus had halved its staff, largely through vacancy freezes rather than redundancies, and had consolidated its operations to a single building in EduCity. The closure of several programmes, including the undergraduate pharmacy course and two master’s degrees, followed a recorded £27 million expenditure on the campus since 2011, which contributed to an overall institutional deficit of £20 million in 2018.
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