ABSTRACT
Universities often see the establishment of overseas operations as a profitable means of responding to unmet student demand in other countries. As a result, the boundedness of national education systems and national educational “markets” further erodes. Proponents of transnational education call for the removal of “barriers to trade”, criticizing measures they see as discriminatory practices, such as visa restrictions, accreditation hurdles and local ownership requirements. While its proponents argue that transnational education is a vital means of expanding educational opportunity and student choice in places with excess demand, it is also at the center of concerns about the commodification and rationalization of education, both in importing and exporting countries. Transnational education serves to build educational capacity selectively in areas in which local providers are constrained or unwilling to respond to commercial demand, but at the same time because of its marketized and foreign nature it is seen to pose potential threats to traditional conceptions of education as a public good, and calls into question the sufficiency of the domestic education system and the quality assurance measures in place to oversee it.
