Seventeen foreign universities have landed in India. Here is how this ends.

The Branch Campus Trilogy, Part 1 of 3 - What Malaysia, the Gulf, and Singapore tell us about India’s branch campus bet

The Ken ran a piece recently about Harmit Dalwadi from Ahmedabad — the student who had a Canadian university offer, a ₹20 lakh loan, and a winter jacket ready, and then didn’t go. Canada changed its visa rules. He enrolled in Deakin University’s new campus in GIFT City (Gujarat International Finance Tec-City, India’s special financial zone in Gandhinagar) instead. The Ken called him the future of Indian higher education.

He is not the future. He is the fourth iteration of an experiment that has run three times before, across Malaysia, Qatar, and Singapore, over twenty-six years. I have gone through the financial records, the closure announcements, and the survival data for every major branch campus experiment in that period. The pattern is consistent enough to be predictive.

Three of India’s seventeen foreign universities will build durable institutions. Seven will operate below ambition indefinitely. Seven will exit within a decade.

The historical record produces that arithmetic. Here is what it looks like.

Malaysia, 1998: the template the world copied

Monash University opened in Bandar Sunway in February 1998, six months into the Asian Financial Crisis. The timing was not accidental. Roughly 20% of Malaysian students had been studying abroad — mostly in Australia and the UK — and the ringgit’s collapse had made that mathematically impossible for the next cohort. Monash arrived to meet a captive demand of 261 first students. The Australian Prime Minister had personally been in the room two years earlier when the MOU was signed.

Thirty institutions followed over the next fifteen years. Nottingham in 2000, the first UK university to open a campus outside the UK. Curtin in Miri in 1999. Heriot-Watt, Newcastle Medicine, Southampton, Reading, Swinburne. By the mid-2010s, Malaysia was the world’s largest host of foreign branch campuses.

Two patterns emerged across the next twenty-five years.

The first: scale concentration. Monash Malaysia now runs to 13,800 students across 91 nationalities — bigger than several Monash campuses in Australia. Nottingham Malaysia: 4,500 students on a 118-acre purpose-built campus in Semenyih. Curtin Malaysia: 1,200 acres in Miri. Three institutions captured most of the demand. All three had the same three things — substantial physical infrastructure, a research mandate treated seriously, and full degrees rather than feeder pipelines back to the home campus.

The second: the long tail. Most of EduCity Iskandar’s universities — the 305-acre education hub Malaysia built in Johor in 2008 as its answer to Qatar’s Education City — operated as single-faculty outposts. Newcastle did medicine only. Southampton did engineering only. Reading did real estate and construction only. Single-floor, single-discipline, in shared corporate complexes. Exactly as the study-abroad consultant described India’s GIFT City campuses to the Ken last month.

The Reading case is the one I find most clarifying. Reading is a top-200 global university. It opened at EduCity in 2014, was formally inaugurated in 2016, and by FY2017-18 had generated a £27.6 million charge to the parent university — an £8 million operating deficit compounded by lease provisions and asset impairments — pushing the entire University of Reading (UK) into a £20 million institutional deficit. A KPMG review concluded breakeven was four years away. Reading’s own CFO flagged the campus “could physically exit/close down on 1 June 2021” via a lease break clause. In June 2019, they halved the Malaysia workforce, closed pharmacy and two master’s degrees, and consolidated from two buildings to one. The last enrolment count publicly disclosed: 684 students in 2018-19, against an ambition of 1,000. They have not published that number since.

Twenty-five years. Two or three durable winners. The rest, struggling — some quietly, one (Reading) nearly catastrophically.

In 2025, Malaysia announced another ten-year foreign-university expansion plan, signing Xiamen and Tsukuba. India is running the same playbook now, a quarter-century after Monash arrived in Bandar Sunway. The question is whether India is also inheriting its failure modes.

The Gulf, 2003: when the host country pays for everything

Qatar’s model was structurally different from Malaysia’s. It is worth understanding why — because it shows what the model looks like when funding is not the constraint.

Qatar Foundation started in 1995 with a specific brief: build a knowledge economy before the oil ran out. The decision was Sheikha Moza bint Nasser’s. Qatar would not send its students to American universities. Qatar would bring American universities to Doha. VCU arrived in 1998. Cornell’s medical school in 2001. Texas A&M in 2003. Carnegie Mellon in 2004. Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service in 2005. Northwestern journalism in 2008. By formal inauguration in 2003, Education City housed eight institutions across 12 square kilometres.

The numbers are significant. Carnegie Mellon alone receives an estimated $50–60 million per year from Qatar Foundation to operate its Doha campus. Cornell has received approximately $2.3 billion in Qatari funding over two decades. The US Department of Education’s foreign gift database records $6.6 billion in transfers from Qatar to American higher education — the single largest foreign funding source in the database. Qatar’s aggregate disclosed investment in American higher education since 1981: $62 billion.

This is not a branch campus model. It is sovereign procurement. Qatar bought American universities the way another country might buy submarines — in bulk, with custom specifications, on long-term maintenance contracts. At least one eventually mutinied.

On 8 February 2024, the Texas A&M Board of Regents voted 7-1, without public discussion, to terminate its Qatar contract by 2028. The vote followed an advocacy report alleging Qatar’s operating contract gave it ownership of weapons-applicable research from the Doha campus. A&M’s official reason: “heightened instability in the Middle East.” Over 1,500 graduates and 730 enrolled students were affected. Qatar Foundation called it a “disinformation campaign.” UCL had quietly exited in 2020. Northwestern is under review.

The non-Qatar Gulf experiments failed faster and harder. George Mason opened in Ras al-Khaimah in 2005, funded by a private education company called Edrak. The pitch was 2,000 students by 2011. By 2009: 180 students, zero graduates. When Edrak proposed cutting the operating budget from $7–8 million to $6.5 million while expecting enrolment to nearly double, George Mason walked away. Michigan State opened in Dubai International Academic City in 2007 targeting 750–1,000 students. By 2010: 85 students. The university needed 100–150 new students per year to break even. It was running at one-third of that. Undergraduate operations closed.

Qatar’s branch campus experiment is what happens when the host country pays for everything. Dubai and Ras al-Khaimah are what happens when it doesn’t. India’s GIFT City model is what happens when neither side is sure who’s paying for what.

Singapore, 2011: the experiment that had every advantage

The Yale-NUS case is the one I think India’s education policymakers and university boards need to study most carefully. Not because it failed for the usual reasons — every other case in this piece failed for predictable reasons. Yale-NUS failed despite getting everything right.

The partnership was announced in March 2011 after a meeting at Davos between NUS President Tan Chorh Chuan and Yale President Richard Levin. The campus was purpose-built — 64,000 square metres on NUS’s UTown site, designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli of New York and Forum Architects of Singapore. Faculty were recruited globally at Yale-comparable salaries. The first cohort in 2013 was 157 students from a global applicant pool that averaged more than 10,000 applications annually across its admissions cycles — around 5% acceptance, above 50% yield. By full scale: 250 per cohort. 90% of graduates from the 2017–2024 cohorts found employment within six months. Alumni won Rhodes, Fulbright, Schwarzman, and Knight-Hennessy scholarships.

By every metric — selectivity, outcomes, faculty calibre, infrastructure, brand — Yale-NUS worked.

On 25 August 2021, NUS sent every Yale-NUS student an email. Town hall next morning. Friday classes cancelled. NUS President Tan Eng Chye announced Yale-NUS would close. The college would merge into a new institution called NUS College. The Yale name would come off. The Class of 2025 would be the last. Yale-NUS officially closed on 30 June 2025.

NUS had invoked a clause in the 2011 founding agreement that allowed either party to exit in 2025. It was inserted as routine governance — never expected to be used. Yale was informed shortly before the public announcement. Pericles Lewis, the founding president: “Yale was fully committed to the partnership and was happy to keep doing it for five, ten more years. It was a unilateral decision on the part of NUS.” Yale had no recourse.

The official reason from Education Minister Chan Chun Sing: “economies of scale” and “intellectual diversity.” Singapore denied academic freedom played any role. The informal reading among Yale-NUS faculty and alumni: Singapore wanted more direct curricular control. A 2019 module titled “Dissent and Resistance in Singapore” had been cancelled before it ran. Pericles Lewis, asked directly, said only that NUS wanted “more direct control of the program.”

Over thirteen thousand people signed a petition against the closure. It changed nothing.

Here is the lesson I take from this. The structural risk in a branch campus is not insufficient demand. It is not inadequate funding. It is that the host country always owns the off-ramp — and at some point, for reasons that may or may not be disclosed publicly, they will use it.

If the best-funded, best-partnered, best-located branch campus in modern history could be closed in a single town hall meeting, the model is not safe anywhere.

What this means for India

Apply the historical base rate to India’s seventeen campuses and this is what the arithmetic produces.

Figure 1. Twenty-eight years of branch campus experiments, four waves, consistent outcomes.

Three will scale. The universities that arrived with the strongest global brand, patient capital, the largest physical footprint, and a genuine research mandate. By 2035, they will look like Monash Malaysia does today — significant, durable, and the exception that proves the rule.

Seven will struggle quietly. Partially filled seats. Two or three programmes that work and several that don’t. They will keep appearing in marketing materials. They will stop publishing enrolment numbers, the way Reading Malaysia did after 2018. Their UK parent institutions — many of which are already running institutional deficits — will write off the experiment as a tax loss. They will survive in form but not in ambition.

Seven will exit. Not loudly. The first will cite strategic refocus on home campuses, within four to five years. The next wave will leave when five-year break clauses come up. By 2034 — a decade after Deakin opened in GIFT City — seven to nine of the original seventeen will no longer be operating in India.

Figure 2. India’s seventeen, projected to 2034.

This is not pessimism. It is arithmetic derived from three independent data sets — Malaysia, the Gulf, Singapore — that all produced the same distribution.

The framework that explains why is simple. Three traits separate the survivors from the failures at every geography, across every time period I looked at.

Figure 3. The survivor traits framework, applied to the historical record and to India’s seventeen.

The first is physical infrastructure. Monash Malaysia is on 16 acres with a purpose-built campus. Nottingham is on 118 acres in Semenyih. Curtin has 1,200 acres in Miri. Yale-NUS had 64,000 square metres of residential colleges. The failures — George Mason in RAK, Michigan State in Dubai, the EduCity long tail — were single-floor or single-building operations sharing space with other tenants. India’s seventeen, per The Ken’s own reporting, are “single-floor operations in corporate buildings.”

The second is research as institutional orientation. The survivors built research bases — Nottingham Malaysia earned a 5-star MyRA rating, Monash Malaysia became the third-largest Monash campus by research output, Yale-NUS produced peer-reviewed publications across disciplines. The failures treated the branch campus as a brand extension, a teaching outpost. India’s seventeen are not building research programmes.

The third is a funding model where the host country has real skin in the game. Qatar’s universities survived twenty years because Qatar paid for everything. Yale-NUS survived twelve because Singapore funded it directly. Monash, Nottingham, and Curtin survived in Malaysia because the host government partnered actively — state support in Sarawak, federal incentives nationally, degree validation through the Malaysian Qualifications Agency. The failures were funded by intermediaries (Edrak), tuition revenue alone (MSU), or parent-university capital that ran out (Reading). India’s seventeen are funded through tax incentives at GIFT City and tuition fees. The host country is providing the runway. It is not providing the cheque.

Of the seventeen operating in India today, two or three tick all three boxes. A handful tick one. Most tick none.

The arithmetic produces the prediction. Three survivors. Seven strugglers. Seven exits. By 2034.

There is, however, one country that looked at this same evidence in 2004 and built something structurally different.

It refused to allow foreign universities to operate as branch campuses at all. It required joint ventures, dual degrees, research mandates, purpose-built campuses, joint governance. It built a different model entirely.

Twenty-two years later, the graduates of those institutions are building the companies reshaping the global technology landscape. The companies are famous. The classrooms that built them are not.

India needs to understand what that country did, and — more critically — what compounded.

That is the second piece in this series. Wednesday.

If you want to go deeper

Most of the Malaysia data comes from Times Higher Education's coverage of the Reading Malaysia accounts crisis (January 2019 and June 2019) and Monash's own published enrolment figures. The Gulf numbers — particularly the $6.6 billion DoE figure and the per-institution funding estimates — are in Wikipedia's Qatari involvement in US higher education article, which itself cites the DoE foreign gift database. The Yale-NUS story is best told by Pericles Lewis himself in his 2024 Daedalus essay, "The Rise and Restructuring of Yale-NUS College." The India framing is built on The Ken's 2026 reporting on GIFT City. That's the reading list.

Part 1 of 3 — The Branch Campus Trilogy

B S Ashwin · freshwin.in