Rethinking physical presence, institutional commitment and student value in India’s TNE experiment
Part I: When a University Becomes a Tenant
One floor of a commercial tech park in Whitefield, Bengaluru. That is where a new foreign university campus is taking shape – built from the outset to be shared with three or four other foreign universities, all co-locating on the same site once it opens.
There’s a wrinkle in this that I haven’t been able to iron out.
It is not the arrival of foreign universities. Quite the contrary. India is finally becoming a destination for institutions that, until recently, were largely interested in recruiting Indian students to their home campuses. The movement from student mobility to institutional mobility is one of the more consequential changes taking place in the geography of higher education.
Nor is it the idea of universities sharing infrastructure. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Under the right circumstances, shared infrastructure can make international education more accessible, more efficient and more financially sustainable.
What bothers me is something more basic.
What exactly do we mean when we call something a university?
The proposition is interesting precisely because it does not fit neatly into either of the categories we instinctively reach for. It is not a sprawling residential university in the Indian tradition. But its architects would also resist “a few classrooms hidden inside an anonymous office building” as a fair description of what they are attempting. What they describe instead is more deliberate: shared back-office functions that let a campus starting with a couple of hundred students feel less thin than its numbers would suggest, shared sports, leisure and student activities meant to be in place from day one rather than built up over years, and faculty who, while formally appointed by their own institution, are expected to guest-lecture across the partner universities sharing the building.
That means the proposition is not simply an efficiency play dressed up in institutional language. It is an explicit attempt to solve the thin-experience problem that affects almost every branch campus in its first years, when it may carry a couple of hundred students rather than the thousands a home campus would. Whether shared infrastructure can actually manufacture the richer student experience being promised, on a single floor of a tech park, is a separate question – arguably the one this whole essay is about – but the intention behind it is not naive, and it does not deserve to be dismissed as a real-estate trick before it has even opened.
A compact urban campus is not, by definition, a lesser university. Nor is a sprawling campus, by definition, a better one. The physical form tells us something. It does not tell us everything.
We have become remarkably comfortable with describing education in commercial language. Students are customers. Degrees are products. Campuses are assets. Classrooms represent capacity. Faculty are resources. Recruitment is customer acquisition. Internationalisation is market expansion.
I understand the logic. Much of it is simply the language of institutional management. But occasionally I find myself stopping at the word product.
If education is a product, what exactly is the student buying? Is it the degree? The logo? The faculty? The campus? The experience? The network? The industry connections? The promise of employability? The international exposure? Or some combination of all these things?
And if the answer is “all of the above,” a more uncomfortable question follows.
Which of these things actually constitutes a university? The economics of a compact, shared model force that question into the open, whether or not anyone building one intends to ask it. A university entering a new country cannot simply reproduce the economics of its home campus. The initial student population may be relatively small. Land and construction are expensive. Many facilities have poor utilisation at small scale. Administrative functions can be duplicated unnecessarily. Why not share them? Indeed, why should several universities each build their own expensive infrastructure if they can create a common environment in which each retains its academic identity? None of that is unreasonable, and none of it is unprecedented.
South Korea’s Incheon Global Campus brings together several foreign universities within a common campus environment. Qatar’s Education City has taken the idea much further, creating a substantial educational and research ecosystem in which international universities coexist with research institutions, cultural facilities and other forms of infrastructure.
These are shared campuses. They are not merely shared buildings – and that gap between the two keeps nagging at me.
When Do Universities Become Tenants?
Imagine several prestigious universities occupying the same commercial building. Each has its own identity, programmes, faculty and degree. The infrastructure is shared. The student services are shared. Perhaps the library is shared. Perhaps some teaching and industry engagement are shared too.
Everything may be academically legitimate. Everything may be financially rational. Everything may be perfectly compliant.
But what has actually been created? A university ecosystem? Or simply a shared address for several separate tenants?
A tenancy is very good at providing space, reception and shared services. A university has historically had to be something more than the address where teaching happens – a place with its own identity, culture and life. The gap between those two things is not just semantics.
This is where my mind keeps going back to a rather simple thought experiment. Imagine taking away the university logos. Imagine that the building simply says Campus. Then imagine University X, University Y, University Z and a fourth institution occupying different parts of the building, each with its own classrooms and academic operations.
Would anything essential have changed?
Perhaps the answer is yes. Perhaps the institutions have created distinct academic communities within a shared environment. Perhaps the common infrastructure produces encounters and opportunities that would not otherwise exist. But perhaps the answer is no. And if the latter is true, then we have learned something important. The institution may still be perfectly legitimate. The degree may still be perfectly valid. The faculty may still be excellent. The outcomes may still be strong. But the university, in every sense that matters, has become a tenant.
That does not make it bad. It makes it something different. And that difference is worth examining.
The Questions the Thought Experiment Turns Into
That thought experiment doesn’t stay theoretical for long. Applied to a real arrangement, it resolves into a short list of very practical questions – the kind no glossy campus brochure exists to answer.
Who owns the curriculum? Who appoints and evaluates the faculty? Who controls assessment? Who owns the relationship with the student – not the classroom, the relationship? Who is accountable when a complaint crosses from one institution’s jurisdiction into another’s? Who controls the shared infrastructure everyone depends on but no single university owns outright?
And the question that matters most and gets asked least: what happens to everyone else if one university in the arrangement decides to leave? If one institution sharing the tenancy withdraws, do the remaining students’ teach-out protections, refund policies and grievance channels hold? Or does the arrangement quietly redistribute the damage onto whoever happens to be left in the building?
There is also an economic question sitting underneath the spatial one, and it deserves to stay separate from it rather than get folded into the same “shared building” picture – because, as it turns out, this version of the risk does not actually require several universities to share a floor at all.
The proposition has a named commercial partner behind it: an Australian international-education company, several decades into the business of sending students to Australia, now entering an India phase after visa tightening at home constricted that pipeline. Its own leadership has described the model plainly – the company invests in and partners with universities to open campuses, taking on the legal processes and capital required so the university gains access to a new market – and it has said, of this specific campus, that it intends this to be the first of many rather than a one-off.
The entity actually building the scalable, replicable asset here is not the university whose name is on the building. It is the commercial partner running the campus behind it. And the structure this creates is more tangled than either party’s marketing suggests: the proposition turns out to involve at least three distinct legal actors – the college holding the entry approval, the older federal university whose name will appear on the degree, and the commercial operator running recruitment, premises and day-to-day operations. If a student is wrongly failed, a programme is discontinued, or the campus closes mid-cycle, which of the three actually answers to India’s regulator? That question does not yet have a settled answer, because the regulatory framework was built to hold a single accountable foreign institution responsible – not a nested structure like this one.
The same underlying question – not who teaches the student, not who awards the degree, but who owns the relationship – turns out to have an even sharper version elsewhere in India’s TNE landscape, involving a different operator working across several cities rather than one shared floor. That version does not need a shared building either, and it deserves its own treatment later in this series. But the logic is identical in both cases.
Whoever owns the relationship also owns everything downstream of it: acquisition, data, cross-selling, progression, employer relationships, alumni engagement, the whole long tail of a person’s connection to an institution across a career. Aggregate enough university names under one commercial operator – in one building or seven cities – and that operator holds something more valuable than any single university’s own student base. It holds a portfolio, whether or not it has finished building one yet.
Which produces an irony I have not been able to shake. Each university involved in an arrangement like this almost certainly believes, in good faith, that it is entering India. But there is a real possibility that the commercial partner underneath it is thinking something closer to the reverse: that the universities are entering its India – its student base, its infrastructure, its data, its relationship with the family that eventually signs the cheque.
That reversal isn’t, on its own, cause for alarm – platforms exist, aggregation exists, and shared infrastructure genuinely can lower costs without corrupting anything academic. What it changes is what the arrangement actually is – not necessarily a fraud, not necessarily a failure, but possibly a different kind of institution altogether than the one whose name is on the building.
Which leaves the harder question still unanswered. Not who profits from the student’s presence, but what was the student’s presence at a university actually supposed to be for – before anyone built a platform, before anyone shared a building, before “campus” became something you could rent by the floor.
Part II: What Is the Place Actually For?
I began this thought experiment by comparing the emerging shared-space proposition with the university campus I instinctively recognise. But the more I looked at it, the less useful that simple comparison became.
There are several different ways in which institutions can use physical space to create value.
There is the traditional university campus, where an institution creates a place that becomes an extension of its identity. There is the education-city model, where several institutions occupy a deliberately created educational geography while retaining substantial institutional and physical identities of their own. There is the economic-city model, where a university is deliberately embedded in a wider economic ecosystem and the location itself becomes part of the educational proposition. And there is the platform model, where shared infrastructure and services make physical presence more efficient.
None of these models is inherently superior. They solve different problems. They create different kinds of value. The question is not which one wins. The question is what each model makes possible, and what it leaves out.
The Education City idea
Rajiv Gandhi Education City in Sonipat was conceived on an entirely different scale from a commercial-floor IBC. The idea was to create a large planned educational district in which multiple institutions could establish themselves.
Whatever one thinks of the execution of the project, the underlying proposition remains interesting. It was not simply: let several universities share our building. It was closer to: let us create a geography in which universities can become themselves.
The institutions share a geographical identity and, potentially, aspects of an educational ecosystem, but they are not simply tenants of one another’s premises. The space gives them room to develop their own identities. That is a different proposition from shared infrastructure alone.
The Economic-City Model
GIFT City model is more interesting still because it challenges my instinct about what a university campus is supposed to be.
It is not primarily an education city. It is a financial and business district, and universities entering that environment are being placed deliberately within an economic ecosystem. That can be an extraordinarily powerful proposition. Imagine studying financial services, FinTech, international business or related disciplines while physically situated within an international financial centre. The surrounding institutions, employers, professional networks and economic activity can become part of the educational experience.
The location is no longer simply where the university happens to be. It becomes part of what the university is offering. That logic was part of the original policy behind the GIFT City IBC proposition – the government’s framework envisaged foreign universities contributing to an extended ecosystem around financial services and technology, with academia and industry working in closer proximity.
GIFT City’s infrastructure architecture has gone further still. The International Financial Services Centres Authority permits International Branch Campuses and Offshore Educational Centres to obtain campus infrastructure and related services from Academic Infrastructure Service Providers – built-up campus facilities, research and development facilities, libraries, laboratories, incubation centres and teaching classrooms, all available on tap rather than built from scratch by each incoming university.
I would hesitate, then, to dismiss the commercial setting of an IBC merely because it is commercial. A location can be commercially dominated and still be educationally meaningful. The question is not whether the surrounding environment is commercial. The question is what that environment contributes to the university.
The Platform Model
There is a fourth model on my original list that deserves its own name rather than staying folded into the others: the platform model, where a commercial intermediary supplies the operational backbone that lets a foreign university establish itself in India without building that capability from scratch.
Eruditus is the clearest example currently operating at scale. It has publicly named seven partner universities establishing campuses across Mumbai, Bengaluru and Gurugram – Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Aberdeen, the University of Bristol, the University of Liverpool, UNSW, the University of Victoria and the University of York – and its role in each case is broadly similar: campus operations, student recruitment, the FEMA-compliant joint-venture structuring that lets foreign capital and Indian regulation meet, and the marketing that builds a pipeline of applicants before a single lecture is delivered.
Eruditus is not alone. What has actually arrived in India over the past year is not one platform but a small cluster of them, sitting between most of the market and almost every foreign university trying to enter it. Alongside Eruditus, operators including ECA, Navitas, GEDU and Oxford International now intermediate a large share of India’s IBC activity between them – different companies, different mechanisms, the same underlying position: infrastructure that has, in practice, become closer to the institution than the institution’s own operations team.
It is worth being precise about what kind of “platform” this is, since Part I already raised a related but distinct question – what happens when several universities share one physical building and become tenants of the same address. That was a question about tenancy: spatial, and visible the moment you walk into the building. Eruditus’s platform is operational: a single intermediary supporting several universities that may never share a room. The University of Liverpool’s Bengaluru campus, for instance, has its own dedicated building, a converted industrial site rather than a shared floor. What it shares with Aberdeen’s or Bristol’s Indian campuses is not square footage. It is the layer of logistics, compliance and recruitment sitting behind all of them, largely invisible to a prospective student.
The proposition already introduced in Part I belongs in this same cluster, just via a different operator. Its own commercial partner pursues a comparable model through financial backing and professional services for one co-located campus, rather than operational support spread across several separately located ones. Different mechanism, same underlying question, already asked back in Part I: once a commercial intermediary is running recruitment, premises, or both, whose institution is it actually starting to become?
Part I’s co-located, single-floor proposition and this one are structurally different, and deserve to be evaluated on separate terms rather than folded into the same critique. Whether this operational layer changes who effectively controls the relationship with the student – and what that means for accountability once the arrangement is running at scale across seven universities and three cities – is a substantial question in its own right, and I have written about it at length elsewhere. Here I want to do something narrower: simply place the model on the map, alongside education cities and economic cities, as one more answer to the same underlying question every foreign university entering India eventually has to face – build it all yourself, or borrow someone else’s infrastructure to get there faster.
The Ultra-Compact Urban IBC
And then there is the proposition already introduced in Part I: a single floor of a tech park in Whitefield, shared from the outset with three or four other universities. If a dedicated building, however modest, or however recently a factory, still counts as compact, this is something more extreme. There is no building of its own here, at least not yet – just a floor, shared.
This is where the question of what compactness can and cannot deliver gets pushed about as far as it currently goes in India. The people building it are explicit that they are trying to engineer richness rather than simply accept its absence: shared back-office functions meant to make a two-hundred-student campus feel less thin than its numbers suggest, shared sports, leisure and student activities intended to exist from day one rather than accumulate over years, and faculty who, while appointed by their own institution, are expected to guest-lecture across the universities sharing the floor. None of that is nothing. It is a genuine attempt to answer, at the smallest possible scale, the question this typology keeps circling back to: not how much campus the university possesses, but how much university exists within it.
But intention is not delivery, and a campus that has not yet opened cannot be judged on results it has not yet produced. Whether a shared floor can actually manufacture what a shared floor is promising – activity, community, cross-institutional intellectual life – is not something promotional material or a conference panel can settle. It is a question only the first two or three cohorts of students will be able to answer, and probably not for several years.
That uncertainty may be the most honest place this typology can arrive at. A traditional campus, an education city, an economic city, even a platform-supported campus like Liverpool’s, all have, at minimum, a building you can stand inside and judge for yourself. An ultra-compact, single-floor co-location does not yet offer even that. What it offers is a bet – a genuinely considered one, not a cynical one – that shared intention can do the work usually done by shared space.
What Does the Place Enable?
This is beginning to feel like a more useful question than the old one about whether an IBC has “adequate physical infrastructure.” Adequate for what? A classroom can be adequate for a lecture. A laboratory can be adequate for an experiment. An office can be adequate for administration. But what makes a place adequate for a university?
Perhaps the answer is not measured in square metres at all. Perhaps it lies in what the physical environment makes possible. Does it create encounters that would otherwise not happen? Does it encourage intellectual community? Does it facilitate research? Does it connect students to employers? Does it provide space for student life? Does it create institutional identity? Does it give students a sense that they belong somewhere? Does it make the institution memorable?
The question is therefore not simply does the university have premises? It is: what does its physical presence enable that would not otherwise exist? That feels like a far more meaningful test of institutional presence.
Part III: The University Is Not a Classroom
The more I think about the physical environment, the more convinced I become that we have underestimated the educational value of things that do not look educational.
The lawn is not there to maximise utilisation. The courtyard is not there to generate revenue. The library is not simply a warehouse for books. The student union is not a cost centre that happens to produce some extracurricular activity.
These things create possibility. A student meets somebody from another discipline. A conversation begins. An idea crosses a boundary. A professor becomes a mentor rather than merely the person who delivered a module. A friendship eventually becomes a business partnership. Someone discovers a book that changes the way they think.
None of these things can be reliably scheduled. That may be why they matter.
A university creates a certain kind of permission: permission to wander intellectually, to spend time on something whose utility is not immediately apparent, to encounter people and ideas without having to justify every encounter in terms of measurable output.
Perhaps this is why I keep returning to the word sacred. Not sacred in a religious sense. Rather, something set apart. A university, at its best, creates a space set apart from the relentless logic of ordinary commercial life. A place where time is allowed to stretch. Where curiosity can precede utility. Where a student can encounter an idea without immediately asking what it will do for their salary.
That separation has value.
But none of this means that a university must possess hundreds of acres before it can create an intellectually rich environment. Some of the world’s most consequential universities exist within dense urban settings. Nor does physical grandeur guarantee intellectual vitality.
The campus is a signal, not a verdict. Space creates possibilities. It does not automatically create community, intellectual life or belonging.
India is about to test that distinction at scale, as foreign universities arrive in forms that do not always resemble the conventional Indian campus. And India already has an unusually strong physical hierarchy of its own to test it against – evidence of a much older instinct than any of us are giving credit for.
The Land Is Part of the Product
The University of Delhi has its extraordinary, almost improbable relationship with the Ridge – a substantial forested landscape sitting inside one of the world’s most crowded cities, and everyone who has walked it knows it is doing something to the experience of studying there that no lecture theatre could replicate. IIT Bombay has Powai and the hills that frame it. Ashoka has deliberately, expensively built spaciousness into its identity from day one, because its founders understood the space was never going to be a footnote to the education – it was going to be read as part of it.
None of this is an accident, and none of it is really about lawns for their own sake. The campus is an act of positioning. A premium institution is, in effect, telling a family: we have created a place where your child will spend two to four of the most formative years of their life – a radically different proposition from we have secured an excellent address at which your child can attend classes.
I want to reach further back than the modern Indian campus for a moment, because I don’t think this instinct is new, or even particularly Western – if anything, it is one of the oldest ideas India has about how learning actually happens. The gurukul tradition never separated the teacher from the place. A student did not attend a lecture by a guru and return to ordinary life in the evening; the student went and lived where the teaching happened, inside a particular grove, under a particular discipline of unhurried time, because the setting itself was understood to be doing part of the teaching. Learning was never imagined as a transaction that could be extracted from its location and delivered anywhere convenient. The place was not a container for the wisdom. It was, in some sense, inseparable from it.
That instinct never really left the Indian imagination of what a serious education looks like, even in its thoroughly modern, thoroughly secular form. It is why a mountain campus or a forested ridge or a deliberately spacious quadrangle still reads, to an Indian parent evaluating where to send a child, as something closer to seriousness than sales copy about location and connectivity ever quite manages.
Here’s when I keep coming back to a sequence that initially surprised me:
Education → sacred → calm → premium → value → identity → network → professional life.
The word premium carries real weight here, because we have abused it terribly in higher education, reducing it to a synonym for expensive. That is not what premium ought to mean.
Perhaps premium means deliberately created. It means that sufficient care has been taken with the environment, the people, the intellectual culture and the experience to communicate something to the student: what happens here matters.
That message can be communicated through a magnificent campus. It can also, perhaps, be communicated through a compact urban environment. The physical form may differ. The underlying intention should not.
Part IV: Who Has to Build the University?
There is another dimension to this discussion that became impossible to ignore once I looked at the regulatory architecture behind the campus.
It is one thing to ask what a university looks like to a student. It is another to ask what the regulatory state requires a university to look like. And here the argument becomes considerably more uncomfortable.
ASSOCHAM’s National Education Council raised exactly this question publicly a few months ago. Its concern was not that India should shut its doors to international universities. It was that internationalisation should coexist with regulatory symmetry and a level playing field. The Ministry of Education, it noted, had permitted a foreign university to commence Indian operations from roughly 50,000 square feet of leased premises in Chennai – allowed, under the current framework, for an initial period of five years – and it argued this deserved thoughtful reflection rather than quiet acceptance. Indian universities, by contrast, operate under a detailed regulatory framework built around land ownership, permanent infrastructure, laboratories, libraries and hostels – norms that assume a university is, by definition, an enduring institution built on sustained commitment. Its proposed way forward rested on three principles: parity between domestic and foreign institutions, long-term commitment to India’s academic ecosystem, and a genuinely level playing field based on academic excellence rather than the accident of where an institution happens to be incorporated.
The institution it was describing is the University of Western Australia, which has been planning its Indian presence from Chennai and Mumbai. Reports have described an initial Chennai operation from leased premises, alongside a much larger long-term investment and expansion plan running into hundreds of crores of rupees. The university has also positioned the Chennai location partly around opportunities for work-integrated learning and industry engagement.
So this is not a story about an institution avoiding India by renting a few rooms. It is a story about how an international university chooses to establish its physical presence – and about what that choice reveals when set against what Indian institutions are required to do.
Land Is More Than an Asset
There is a tendency in institutional economics to see land and buildings as capital expenditure. Universities, however, have traditionally understood them somewhat differently.
Land is permanence. A building is commitment made visible. A laboratory is a statement about what the institution intends to teach and research. A library says something about what it intends to preserve. A campus says something about whether the institution expects to be there long enough for several generations of students to leave their imprint upon it.
Physical commitment, in other words, is not really about square footage. It is about the permanence signal.
But we have to be careful here. A leased campus is not necessarily an absence of commitment. A lease may be the sensible first stage of a serious institutional strategy. It can allow an institution to establish demand, recruit students and faculty, develop partnerships and understand the market before making a much larger capital commitment. Indeed, a phased approach may be more responsible than building a large campus before the institution knows whether the market will support it.
The real question is therefore not whether a university owns its building – that would be too crude. It is what degree of institutional commitment the physical arrangement actually represents, and whether that commitment is proportionate to the institution’s stated ambitions in India.
Physical presence is not physical commitment
Physical presence and physical commitment keep getting treated as the same thing in TNE discussions. They are not.
A university can have physical presence without necessarily having demonstrated long-term physical commitment. It can also demonstrate substantial institutional commitment without owning every square metre from the first day. A long-term lease, a substantial fit-out, dedicated facilities, significant faculty investment and a clearly articulated expansion pathway can collectively represent something very different from a short-term, easily reversible arrangement.
The reverse is also possible. A magnificent building can be little more than a shell if the institution inside it has little academic, research or social substance.
So the physical form alone cannot answer the question. The trajectory matters. The purpose matters. The commitment matters. And that is why I would refine Physical Commitment, the first indicator of the verification framework I use professionally. It should not become a crude ownership test. It should test the credibility of the institution’s permanence and investment in relation to what it says it intends to build.
The Uncomfortable Asymmetry
There remains, however, a difficult policy question. If Indian private universities are expected to demonstrate institutional seriousness through land, buildings and permanent infrastructure, while foreign universities can initially demonstrate their presence through leased premises, why should the standard be different?
There may be very good reasons. India wants foreign universities to enter. High upfront capital requirements can deter entry. A phased model may actually be more responsible than forcing a university to build a large campus before demand has been demonstrated. All of that is reasonable.
But if flexibility is good for foreign universities, should it not also be available, under appropriate conditions, to credible Indian institutions? Conversely, if permanent physical commitment really is fundamental to the meaning of a university, should foreign institutions ultimately be expected to demonstrate a comparable commitment?
We need to decide what we actually believe.
Perhaps the answer lies somewhere between the two. India can encourage foreign universities through a more flexible entry phase while requiring a clear trajectory towards long-term institutional presence. At the same time, it can reconsider whether every aspect of domestic regulation needs to equate institutional seriousness with ownership of physical assets.
That would be a genuine conversation about regulatory modernisation, rather than a simple argument about foreign versus Indian universities.
A Live Test Case – From Greece
While I was finishing this section, a live test case arrived from an unexpected direction. Greece’s supreme administrative court annulled the operating licences of three foreign university branches – arrangements involving the University of York, Keele University and Anatolia College – after finding real defects in how they had been approved: building requirements not properly verified before licences were issued, a conflict of interest inside the evaluation committee, and accreditation criteria the court found too vague to apply consistently. Crucially, the court did not strike down the underlying law that opened Greece to foreign university branches. It struck down the way that law had been applied in these three cases.
This section has been making that argument hypothetically. Greece just made it as a ruling. Approval is a point-in-time decision. It answers whether an institution was permitted to enter. It does not, on its own, answer whether the conditions behind that permission were properly verified, or whether they survive scrutiny once the campus is real rather than promised. Greece has just demonstrated, in a courtroom, what happens when they are not.
This belongs in an essay about India rather than a footnote about Greece because one of the three affected institutions, the University of York, already has an approved Indian campus of its own – in Mumbai’s Powai Business District, alongside Bristol and UNSW, all three receiving their Letters of Approval within days of each other in June. The same institution is now running two live regulatory experiments at once, in two jurisdictions asking related but different questions. Greece is asking whether the original approval was properly made. India, sooner or later, should be asking whether the institution continues to deserve the approval it was given. Neither question makes the other unnecessary. A regulator that only asks the first is vulnerable to exactly what just happened in Athens. A regulator that only asks the second has no foundation to build the question on in the first place.
This isn’t cause to doubt York’s Mumbai campus specifically, and one jurisdiction’s ruling shouldn’t become an unearned verdict on an entirely different one’s regulatory process. But it is a useful, uncomfortable reminder that the question this section keeps circling – is a physical commitment credible, or merely permitted – does not disappear once a licence is issued. It just changes who is answerable, and when.
Part V: What Are Students Actually Buying?
The more I think about the language of education as a product, the less comfortable I become with it.
Not because I believe universities should be insulated from economics. They cannot be. Nor because students do not deserve value for the considerable amounts of money they and their families invest. They absolutely do.
The problem is more fundamental. If education is a product, what exactly is the product?
Try answering it honestly, item by item, and something uncomfortable happens. The university logo sells status – the signalling value of being able to say a particular name. The campus sells an environment, a sense of belonging to a place larger than any one class. The “student experience” sells memory, which slowly hardens into identity. The alumni network sells social capital. Industry partnerships sell access – the possibility, not the guarantee, of employability. World-class faculty sell access to expertise, more than they sell the expertise itself. International exposure sells cultural capital. The degree certificate sells a credential – a compressed, portable signal of all of the above, legible to anyone who has never met the graduate.
And then there is one more row on the list, and I have tried several times to fill it in, and I keep arriving at the same blank space.
Learning sells – what, exactly?
That blank isn’t a mistake but the whole problem, sitting in plain sight. Learning is not really a product, and no amount of careful packaging changes that fact. A university can provide the conditions for learning – teachers, books, laboratories, discourse, questions, an intellectual tradition worth arguing with, peers, mentors, unhurried time, the kind of space I spent the last essay defending. What it cannot do is manufacture learning on its own premises and hand the finished article to the student the way a shop hands over a phone. The student has to do the learning. Nobody else can do it on their behalf, however excellent the surrounding infrastructure.
You can buy a degree. Can you buy an education?
I can buy a phone and possess it. I can buy a car and possess it. I can book a hotel room and experience it. But I cannot quite buy an education in the same sense.
I can buy admission. I can buy access. I can buy an environment. I can buy instruction. I can buy a credential. But I cannot purchase the transformation itself and have somebody deliver it to me. I have to participate in it. I have to read. I have to think. I have to struggle with ideas. I have to be wrong. Sometimes I have to be told that I am wrong. I have to change.
That creates an uncomfortable contradiction with the idea of the student as customer. The customer is generally entitled to satisfaction. Education sometimes requires something rather different. Sometimes a teacher gives a student something the student did not know they needed and would not have asked for. Sometimes the teacher says, flatly, no, you’re wrong – and means it as a gift, not an insult. Sometimes the curriculum is difficult, or frustrating, or simply boring, and that is not a service failure, it is the process working as intended.
Education, at its best, sometimes requires the student to leave dissatisfied with who they were when they arrived. That is very close to the opposite of good customer service, and no amount of rebranding “student” as “customer” resolves the contradiction – it just hides it more effectively.
Which is one more reason a university cannot be reduced to the place where a transaction occurs between a student and an institution. It is the environment within which the student participates in something the transaction never fully captures.
The Indian Premium Question
A parent paying a substantial amount for a child’s education is not merely buying contact hours. They are making an enormous bet on a formative period of life.
Where will their child spend the next three or four years? Who will they meet? What will they read? What will challenge them? What kind of people will surround them? What kind of confidence will they acquire? What kind of person will emerge at the other end?
These are not procurement questions. They are questions about becoming.
The physical environment carries so much symbolic weight for exactly this reason. The student is not simply being educated in a place. They are being shaped by a place. That place may be a sprawling residential campus. It may be a compact urban campus. It may be part of an education city. It may be embedded in an economic district. The form can vary. The underlying question remains: what kind of educational life does the place make possible?
Part VI: The Value Perception Test
This discussion eventually forced me to look again at a framework I had developed for evaluating the credibility of TNE propositions.
The Seven-Indicator Verification Framework was designed to answer a relatively straightforward question: is this a genuine, institutionally substantive TNE proposition? It looks at physical commitment, faculty architecture, research infrastructure, mobility architecture, student protection, governance transparency and curriculum adaptation. The framework is deliberately sceptical. It is designed to distinguish genuine institutional engagement from arrangements that merely look impressive on paper.
For a while, the eighth indicator I added to that foundation was Employment Outcomes Architecture – the career impact signal, asking whether the degree actually converts into a job. That is the version some readers will already know.
But something was still missing, and this essay is where I finally saw what it was.
The Missing Piece
We had indicators for institutional integrity. We had an indicator for employment outcomes. But we had not explicitly asked the question that comes before both.
Why should the student choose this institution?
That becomes Indicator 8: Perceived Institutional Value – the Value Perception Signal. Employment Outcomes moves to Indicator 9: the Career Impact Signal. This is the update to the framework I use professionally, and I think it is the right one: the earlier ordering asked the institution to prove itself and then prove it worked, without ever asking whether a family should have chosen it in the first place. This essay is what convinced me that question needed its own indicator, and its own position in the sequence.
I want to sharpen the ninth indicator slightly while I am at it, because “did the degree convert into a job” turns out to be a narrower test than the one that actually matters. A first job is a single data point, vulnerable to timing, to a hiring freeze, to a sector’s bad year – none of which says much about the institution that produced the graduate. The more durable question is whether the graduate can do something a first job cannot fully capture: adapt when the job changes, learn again without being taught to, work across unfamiliar contexts, solve problems the curriculum never anticipated. Employment Outcomes Architecture, properly understood, is not asking whether the ticket got punched once. It is asking whether the institution built something in the graduate that keeps paying out after the first job stops being the relevant measure.
The logic is now rather elegant. The first seven indicators ask whether the institution is credible. The eighth asks whether the proposition is perceived as worth choosing. The ninth asks whether the promised value ultimately translates into durable, demonstrable capability.
Integrity → Choice → Outcome.
This sequence feels much closer to the actual student journey.
Perception is not superficial
“Perceived value” can sound like a marketing term. It isn’t one.
A student does not encounter an institution as an auditor. They encounter it as a prospective member of a community. They see the campus. They experience the admissions process. They look at photographs. They speak to current students. They compare fees. They ask about employment. They look at rankings. Their parents ask about reputation. They imagine themselves there.
All of that becomes part of their judgement. A perfectly credible institution can therefore have weak perceived value. And a highly attractive proposition can have weak institutional substance. The purpose of the framework is to expose both.
The physical campus is one component of perceived institutional value. It is not the whole of it. A student may value the scale and landscape of a residential university. Another may value the density and connectivity of an urban campus. A student in GIFT City may place extraordinary value on being embedded within a financial ecosystem. Another may value the community created by a multi-university education city.
Perceived value is contextual. What matters is whether the physical and institutional environment delivers the value the proposition promises.
Part VII: A University Address Is Not a University
This is where I eventually arrive.
The answer isn’t to insist that every university must have hundreds of acres of lawn. That would be absurd. Universities can be urban, compact, technologically sophisticated and architecturally unconventional.
Nor is the answer to romanticise the traditional campus. A beautiful campus can be intellectually empty. A compact campus can be intellectually alive. A leased campus can be the first phase of a deeply committed institutional strategy. A purpose-built campus can exist without creating much social or intellectual life at all.
The building alone cannot tell us. The physical campus is a signal, not a verdict.
The issue is not acreage. It is not even ownership. It is intentionality, institutional substance and commitment. Has the institution created a place that supports the intellectual, social and human dimensions of education? Has it created a credible academic community? Has it created belonging? Has it created opportunities for research, interaction, mobility and professional development? Does its physical arrangement demonstrate a commitment proportionate to its ambitions? And does the whole proposition deliver enough value for a student to look back upon the experience as more than the purchase of a credential?
These are harder questions than “how many acres?” – and the ones that actually decide whether the place is worth attending.
The Harder Test
So I return to the question that started this whole chain of thought.
Can universities share space? Of course. Can foreign universities operate successfully from leased or shared facilities? Certainly. Can such arrangements reduce costs and broaden access? Very possibly. Can an economic ecosystem become part of the educational proposition? Absolutely. Can a leased campus be the right way to begin a long-term institutional commitment? Without question.
The challenge is to distinguish between physical presence and institutional presence, between infrastructure and environment, between efficiency and value, and ultimately between a place where education is delivered and a place in which education happens.
India’s TNE experiment turns on exactly this distinction. We are not simply deciding where foreign universities will teach. We are, perhaps without quite realising it, deciding what kinds of institutions we are prepared to recognise as universities in India.
And there is another question beneath that one. If we are willing to give foreign universities greater flexibility in how they establish physical presence, are we prepared to reconsider the assumptions embedded in the regulatory architecture governing Indian universities? That is not an argument against internationalisation. It is an argument for thinking carefully about what kind of internationalisation we want.
The Nine-Indicator Framework earns its keep here. The physical campus matters. But it is only one signal. Faculty matter. Research matters. Mobility matters. Student protection matters. Governance matters. Curriculum matters. Perceived institutional value matters. And ultimately, outcomes matter. No single building can carry all of that weight.
What remains after the building?
Years after graduation, what does a university actually leave behind? That might be the question I should have started with.
The degree certificate, certainly. The knowledge, if the education was good. The friendships. The mentors. The habits of thought. The confidence. The network. The memories. The sense of belonging to something that existed before the student arrived and will continue after they leave.
None of that arrives through the scheduled parts of the timetable. It arrives through the hour nobody scheduled – the conversation that ran past when it should have ended, the society that could never survive a cost-benefit review, the professor who kept talking after the lecture was technically over, the encounter nobody planned and nobody could have. That hour cannot be specified in a procurement document, and a framework that only measures what can be specified will always undercount the very thing that makes an institution worth attending in the first place. It is closer to a liturgical idea than an operational one – a set-apart time, protected from ordinary usefulness precisely so that something less ordinary can happen inside it.
This is the real distinction between where I studied and my university: a student can study almost anywhere, but a university has to become something more – a place in the student’s memory, identity and imagination.
The real test of an International Branch Campus, then, is not whether it can deliver a foreign degree in India. It is whether, years later, its graduates can look back and say: “That was my university.”
Not merely: “That was where I studied.”
There is a world of difference between those two statements. One describes an address. The other describes belonging.
That is what we should be asking of India’s TNE experiment. Not whether a foreign university can become a tenant. But whether, in becoming a tenant, it can still become a university.
Part VIII: What Would Be Lost
Part VII left me fairly satisfied with a question: not whether a foreign university can become a tenant, but whether, in becoming one, it can still become a university. I sat with that for a while. Then a piece of writing that had nothing to do with international branch campuses at all made me realise it wasn’t yet the deepest question available.
Dr Mona Puri writes on university governance – not TNE, not IBCs, not India’s regulatory architecture, just the ordinary, unglamorous discipline of how a board should think about the institution it is responsible for. Her argument, briefly: growth is not the same as progress. A university can expand its programmes, its infrastructure, its admissions and its visibility, and still lose sight of why it exists while doing so, because more of almost anything can look like progress, and only purpose can tell you whether it actually is.
She asks a version of a question I think every institution should be required to sit with, foreign or domestic, tenant or landlord:
“If our university disappeared tomorrow, what would society genuinely lose?”
Not its buildings. Not its ranking. Not its revenue. Not its administrative structure. What would actually be missing.
The IBC Version of the Question
Dr. Puri wasn’t thinking about international branch campuses when she wrote that, which is exactly why the question is useful here. Apply it, and something happens to everything the last seven parts of this series have been circling.
Imagine asking a foreign university, ten years into its Indian campus: if this disappeared tomorrow, what would India genuinely lose?
If the honest answer is a globally recognised degree, delivered locally, that a family could otherwise only get by sending a child abroad – that is something. But it is a comparatively thin answer, and thin answers have a way of surviving mainly on inertia.
If the honest answer is closer to several thousand graduates, a research capability that did not previously exist here, an industry ecosystem, a faculty network, mobility pathways running in both directions, and a distinctive contribution to how this city or this field thinks – that is a different order of answer entirely.
The difference between those two answers is not measured by any of the nine indicators this series has spent eight parts building. All nine could be satisfied – a real building, or a credible trajectory toward one; permanent faculty; genuine research infrastructure; protected students; transparent governance; contextualised curriculum; a proposition families perceive as worth choosing; graduates with durable capability rather than just a first job – and the institution could still, in Dr. Puri’s sense, not entirely know why it is there.
A layer above the indicators, not inside them
This doesn’t belong inside the nine indicators as a tenth. It sits above them, the way Dr. Puri’s own governance sequence sits above a university’s operational metrics: Purpose → Strategy → Investment → Execution → Outcomes → Societal Value.
The nine indicators tell us whether an institution has substance – whether its claims survive scrutiny. Purpose tells us what that substance is supposed to accomplish. Societal value tells us whether, once achieved, any of it actually matters beyond the institution itself.
Purpose. Then Institutional Integrity – Indicators 1 to 7. Then Perceived Institutional Value – Indicator 8. Then durable student and career impact – Indicator 9. Then Societal Value.
The small revision I made to Indicator 9 earlier in this series turns out to matter more than it looked like at the time, for the same reason. A first job is an institutional metric. Durable capability – the ability to adapt, to learn again, to work across unfamiliar contexts, to keep creating value once the job that was trained for no longer exists – is closer to what Dr. Puri means by societal value operating at the level of a single graduate. The two questions, asked at different altitudes, turn out to be asking almost the same thing.
Why This Changes the Argument About the Campus, Not Just the Ending
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to let this collapse back into the very campus-romanticism I spent Parts II and III trying to earn honestly rather than assert. A sprawling campus is not the purpose of a university. Nor is an IBC inherently deficient because it occupies a compact urban site, or a shared floor, or a converted glass factory, or a tower inside a financial district.
The question a purpose lens actually asks is sharper than acreage: does this physical model advance the institution’s purpose, or has it become a mechanism for adding enrolment, revenue and market presence that merely resembles purpose? An urban campus that creates extraordinary access to an economic ecosystem may well be advancing it. A shared floor that creates a meaningful academic community may be advancing it too, eventually, once the bet the ultra-compact model is making has had time to pay off or fail. A large campus that creates belonging, research capacity and intellectual life is advancing it in the most familiar way of all. None of the models this series has walked through is disqualified by its geometry. Every one of them is answerable to the same harder question underneath it.
That is a more demanding test than anything a “Regus” comparison could deliver on its own, and a fairer one – because it does not treat physical compactness as evidence of thinness, or physical grandeur as evidence of substance. It asks what the form was actually for.
Full Circle
This series started with a wrinkle I couldn’t iron out – a floor in a tech park, and a question about what exactly we mean when we call something a university. It has moved since then through space, through institutional presence, through what a student is actually buying, through the trajectory a physical commitment has to demonstrate before it counts as credible, through the value a family perceives before they ever enrol.
Every part of that mattered, and I would not unwrite any of it. But Dr. Puri’s question is the one I would actually want an institution to sit with, ten years after it opens whichever campus it eventually opens, wherever it decides to put it.
Not: did you own the building, lease it, or share it with three other universities on the same floor.
Not even: did your graduates get jobs, or become people capable of building something larger than the first job.
But: if you disappeared from India tomorrow, what would genuinely be missing?
A tenant can become a university. That much I still believe. But a university, tenant or otherwise, still has to be able to answer the harder question underneath that one – the one no lease, no campus and no indicator can answer on its behalf.
