ABSTRACT
In the past decade many universities have extended their education and research activities across national boundaries. The “offshoring” of higher education is most commonly achieved by outsourcing some aspects of education provision to a foreign partner, but increasingly universities themselves are investing in their own foreign campuses. In the education sector this phenomenon is usually referred to as “transnational” education, a term which encompasses any education delivered by an institution based in one country to students located in another. Thanks to cheap international transportation and communications, institutions with excess capacity in one country can relocate some of their operation abroad to serve students in another country in which that form of education is in short supply. On one level, transnational education is evidence of the invisible hand of the market at work, efficiently allocating educational resources across borders. Those who are wary of the commercialization of higher education tend to see the development of offshore education as a threat to the very existence of public education systems that find themselves in competition with foreign intruders. Sometimes transnational education is seen as a means for developing countries rapidly to boost the capacity of their education systems by accessing the world’s most advanced education systems, thereby accelerating the process of human capital building and therefore economic development.
