Inside Higher Ed reports on the dashed hopes of American universities hoping to open branches in China:
Colleges across the United States continue to plan and construct ever-more-ambitious extensions of themselves abroad. A front-page article on branch campuses in Sunday’s New York Times, the first in a series on higher education and globalization, described the phenomenon as “a kind of educational gold rush.”
Yet, in China — where the market for higher education is sizzling hot and the quantity of potential students staggeringly large — a number of highly ambitious plans by American colleges to open full-fledged campuses have fizzled or otherwise been indefinitely forestalled. To take another example, in May 2005, Inside Higher Ed reported that the University of Montana planned to open a campus for 2,000 Chinese undergraduates in fall 2006. The hoped-for campus — which would be funded by private investors — has so far been mired in the Chinese Ministry approval process.
