For years, American universities have been on building sprees far from their home campuses. From Abu Dhabi to Shanghai and Seoul to Tokyo, names like NYU, Duke, Georgetown and Temple now adorn the tops of glass towers and teaching centers on foreign soil.
It’s not just brand-name schools making the international push, either. Smaller colleges perhaps lacking the resources for brick-and-mortar footprints have instead inked joint ventures with overseas institutions while others have marketed their more cost-effective online degrees internationally.
The global push looks great on paper and sounds even better in university marketing. What aspiring higher-ed student — in the U.S. or from abroad — wouldn’t at least consider joining a university boasting options for overseas campus study and convenient online classes?
Behind the hype, though, it’s mostly all-business. In the face of an upcoming enrollment cliff, more students than ever reconsidering the value of higher education, and a skyrocketing AI economy making employment more accessible for people without a college education, universities are working harder than ever to find new markets for students.
A Crowded Market in the Rush for New Tuition Dollars
Nearly two-thirds of the U.S.’ roughly 4,000 degree-granting institutions could see their domestic student pool shrink in the next five years. Demand at Ivy League schools and highly selective colleges at the top of U.S. News’ rankings remain as high as ever, but the same can’t be said for the hundreds of less-selective universities and smaller liberal arts colleges. The financial struggle has led to 44 higher-ed institutions closing their doors or merging over the past two years alone.
That’s where international students come in. They pay full tuition prices at U.S schools without qualifying for most state and federal scholarships that domestic students enjoy. It’s true that President Donald Trump’s America First agenda and increased vetting of foreign students has led to lower numbers of international students on campus. But the number of foreign students earning degrees from American universities either online, via international partnerships or satellite campuses outside the country continues to grow.
“It’s a fantastic way to keep tuition revenue flowing even when domestic enrollment drops — you market your brand globally and online,” explained higher-ed consultant Drumm McNaughton. McNaughton has consulted for over two dozen universities in the U.S. and abroad since founding The Change Leader, Inc., a higher education consulting firm, in 2007.
About 85 international branch campuses of U.S universities now operate worldwide, with most spread out across Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Nearly one-quarter of all undergraduates at U.S. institutions, including international students, and around 40% of graduate students study completely online, while upwards of 60% of both undergrads and graduate students have taken at least one online course.
International expansion is no doubt designed to fill tuition coffers and “keep up with the times,” says Bethany Simunich, vice president for innovation at non-profit advocacy group Quality Matters. But it’s also more nuanced. Simunich, who spearheads Quality Matters’ annual Changing Landscape of Online Education (CHLOE) report, believes schools’ rationale is mostly sound.
“Expanding access doesn’t inherently mean sacrificing quality,” she said.
“Reputation suffers not because of modality or geography, but because of unstructured, unplanned growth.”
In other words, programs built correctly can enhance a university’s global reputation. But programs slapped together and rushed out the door just to chase revenue risk diluting it.
“It’s a bit of a balancing act,” McNaughton said. “But then again, for schools that really specialize and want to be leaders in certain online programs, I think there’s less fear of failure because they’re doing it with the right intentions. If your intention is solely to chase revenue, that’s where it becomes a more slippery slope.”
In-House Versus OPM-Fueled “Zoom U”
At Oregon State University, Jessica DuPont has overseen one of the largest built-from-scratch online programs in the country. A 29-year OSU veteran, DuPont recalls launching the school’s “Ecampus” back in 2002 and helping build it to its current capacity of 120 programs serving over 15,000 students and growing. Besides in-state students, OSU’s Ecampus serves people in all 50 states and more than 800 students across 60 countries.
“It’s really about mission and fit,” DuPont said. “We built everything ourselves over decades, and had our faculty deeply involved. That ensured consistency and quality, and it’s become part of our culture.”
DuPont said that if on-campus enrollment starts to slide, Oregon State has equipped its Ecampus to make up for the difference. The school plans to scale its online programs proportionally based on an economic model reflecting “organic growth” aligning with OSU’s strengths and branding as a land-grant university.
By contrast, universities that outsource entire programs to third-party Online Program Managers (OPMs) can veer into “white-labeling,” according to Penn State professor Kevin Kinser. Kinser, a longtime scholar of cross-border higher education, says OPM vendors commonly sell the same curriculum to multiple universities under different brand names. Students then can’t tell the difference between OPM programs, and some universities deliberately obscure their dependence on the third-party providers.
A cautionary example, per Kinser: graduates of University of Southern California’s online social work program in 2023 sued the school, alleging they were misled about USC’s reliance on OPM company 2U in running the program. USC allegedly marketed its online social work program as “exactly the same” as its on-campus program, charging over $100,000 for tuition. Among other differences, students later discovered 2U staff taught the online classes instead of regular USC faculty.
“There are so many universities and online programs that just haven’t been straightforward about what they really are and who’s really running them,” Kinser said. “It’s unfortunate because it discredits the entire model and can make it harder for students to discover schools doing things the right way.”
DuPont says only Oregon State professors who instruct on-campus also teach the same subjects for their Ecampus classes, adding faculty are trained to give online students “the same quality of instruction.” In a global higher-ed market that’s getting increasingly more competitive for online and overseas dollars, DuPont believes merely “flipping a switch” to digital learning just won’t cut it.
“Any school can flip a switch and call it an online class,” she said. “But we want students to know this isn’t ‘Zoom U.’ This is a program built over decades with a whole team focused on quality.”
What Lasting Programs do and How to Market them
The institutions building programs that endure tend to share a few visible traits — and the marketers behind those programs tend to talk about them differently.
Kinser warned students to be skeptical of grandiose announcements that exist more on paper than in practice.
“We’ve found numerous examples of elaborate websites put up in foreign countries with photographs of signings and promises of branch campuses from U.S. universities,” he said. “But when you go to the home institution’s website, there’s absolutely no mention of it.”
In those cases, overseas partner schools may tout their U.S. university affiliations for added prestige, even though the American institution itself is minimally involved. Per Kinser, if a program isn’t clearly described on both the U.S. university’s official site and the partner institution’s, it may not be worth much more than the press release.
He advised students and parents to first contact the U.S. school’s admissions office directly.
“If their answer is, ‘We don’t know what you’re talking about,’ that tells you everything,” he said.
“When the institution itself promotes and integrates the program, it’s real,” he added. “When it exists only in a press release or a partner’s website, it’s something else.”
Simunich, the researcher from Quality Matters, also recommended checking for U.S.-based accreditation. Genuine programs will have a recognized U.S. accreditor to validate the program’s legitimacy and quality, while lesser programs might only be accredited within their home countries. For marketers, that means emphasizing U.S. accreditation and its importance to potential students.
Finally, solid programs will feature a number of “quiet quality” perks that most students often overlook. Sustainable programs provide online tutoring, advising, and tech support, Simunich said. They also have their own university professors teaching courses instead of third-party subcontractors. These are the proof points marketers at sustainable programs put forward — and the ones cash-grab programs tend to quietly omit.
“The good news is that a majority of institutions are practicing some type of this quality assurance,” she said. “But we’ve found by and large they stop short of properly communicating that to prospective students. It’s a missed opportunity and requires extra diligence on behalf of the applicants themselves to discern and figure out what’s best.”
For marketers, that’s the opening and the obligation. The institutions that win the next decade of online and international enrollment won’t be the ones with the loudest launch announcements. They’ll be the ones whose marketing tells the truth about who’s teaching, who’s accrediting, and who’s actually running the program.
