What India’s Foreign Universities Must Really Deliver
I read Riju Mehta’s piece in ET Wealth this week comparing what a foreign degree costs in India against what it costs at the home campus. Southampton’s Gurugram campus charges about forty-one lakh for a three-year undergraduate degree; the same degree in the UK runs to ninety-six lakh. Deakin and Wollongong have been operating out of GIFT City for close to two years now. Queen’s Belfast starts in January. The pros-and-cons list running alongside is one I’ve seen in some form in every piece on this subject: cheaper, no visa risk, a recognised name, set against a handful of programmes, a small campus, and no guaranteed route to a job abroad.
All of that is true and none of it, to me, is the point. The comparison being drawn is between the cost of a Southampton degree here and the cost of one there. The comparison that actually matters is between what either degree does for the person holding it in five years, and I don’t think that can be read off a course fee table.
A family paying forty-one lakh rupees isn’t really buying three years of lectures. They’re betting that this degree changes what kind of job their child can get, which employers will take the call, whether a resume gets past the first filter. That’s the bet I think should be interrogated, not the sticker price. A campus’s job – any campus, foreign or not – is to make good on that bet. The buildings, the crest, the line about being ranked in some global top 500, are all downstream of whether it actually does.
“Same degree as the home campus” is the claim every one of these launches depends on, and I want to be precise about what it does and doesn’t promise. The syllabus can be identical. The exam papers can be moderated by the same external board. What it can’t promise is the faculty who built Southampton’s reputation over a century, the alumni network that gets a CV opened in London, the research groups a student might stumble into on that actual campus. A branch campus starts without most of that. It has to build its own version, in India, and I think that takes far longer than a launch date suggests.
This is the part I think the marketing skips over. A brand can be licensed. A reputation can’t. Southampton’s name on a building in Gurugram borrows something real, but what it borrows is trust earned somewhere else, by people who aren’t there, over a period the Gurugram campus hasn’t had yet.
There’s a second shift I think is worth naming, more interesting than the cost question. Transnational education is, underneath the academic language, an employment proposition. The student thinks she’s buying an education. The parent thinks he’s buying prestige. The employer is the one who actually settles whether either purchase held its value, and does so years after the fact. By that measure, I think the campuses that end up mattering won’t be the ones with the most recognisable crest. They’ll be the ones that build real relationships with Indian industry, read where the workforce is heading rather than what the brochure says today, and produce graduates employers go looking for.
Of everything a branch campus has to build on its own, faculty is the one I keep coming back to, and it gets the least attention in the public conversation. Rankings, programme names, the “same degree” line – all of it overlooks who actually stands in front of the classroom. There’s an assumption that a university can open a campus in India and simply recruit locally to recreate the experience of the home campus. I’m not convinced that’s true. Faculty at a place like Southampton are the product of an ecosystem that shaped them over decades past the doctorate – sustained research, international collaboration, peer review, competitive grants, colleagues who challenge their thinking. A classroom shaped by that experience runs on debate and disagreement rather than note-taking. That culture doesn’t transfer through a hiring process; it’s the product of an environment, not a set of qualifications.
None of this means India lacks strong academics – it clearly doesn’t. But its best researchers are already embedded in institutions where they have labs, doctoral students, funded projects and reputations built over years, and persuading them to leave isn’t easy or cheap. The obvious alternative – bringing faculty from the home campus – isn’t simple either. International salaries, housing, schooling, relocation and research funding add up quickly, and every professor teaching in Gurugram is one fewer teaching in Southampton. A home campus can’t keep exporting its strongest people without weakening itself. You can put up a building, license a curriculum and buy the technology fast enough. A faculty ecosystem is the one thing I don’t think any of that speed can buy.
None of this means there’s a fixed playbook to import either. What growth actually looks like, in practice, is fairly specific: an India campus that gets to design its own electives rather than inherit a fixed catalogue from the parent; research tie-ups with Indian companies or government missions – a GIFT City campus, for instance, has an obvious opening into fintech and financial services simply given where it’s been planted; placement offices that build their own relationships with Indian employers instead of leaning on the parent brand to do that work by proxy. An IBC grows the way most institutions grow: by adding real capability year over year, in directions the local market actually needs. India’s labour market, regulatory terrain and industrial priorities don’t look like Malaysia’s or the UAE’s or Singapore’s, so a model that worked in Kuala Lumpur isn’t a model that will work in Gurugram just because both buildings share a crest.
Judging any of this by trajectory sounds like the right instinct, but I don’t think it works yet. These campuses are twelve, eighteen, thirty months old. There isn’t a placement trend to point to, because most of them haven’t had a placement season. Research output, and the kind of faculty culture I’ve just described, take years to show up in any measurable way – trajectory is the right metric for 2029, not for right now.
What I think is actually visible today is different: How much autonomy has the India campus actually been given to design its own programmes? Are the faculty being hired from Indian industry and academia, or flown in on short postings, and either way, what is the campus doing to build toward the kind of research culture I described above rather than just staff a timetable? Do industry MOUs or an advisory board exist before the first cohort graduates, or only after? Does the regulatory approval the campus operates under give it room to adapt, or lock the curriculum to a template built for a different country? None of that tells you the faculty ecosystem already exists – that part genuinely takes time, and I don’t think it can be rushed by any of this. But it does tell you whether a campus is oriented toward building one at all, which is a fair question to ask in year one even if the answer to “has it arrived” has to wait.
Mehta’s own pros-and-cons list is a useful marker of how far this conversation has already moved. A few years ago it began and ended with one question – is it foreign? Her list runs both columns: cost and convenience against thin programme choice and no guaranteed route abroad. That alone tells me the people asking these questions have gotten more literate than the marketing aimed at them. The next questions follow naturally from her own list: who’s actually teaching the programme, what a rupee spent here returns against a rupee spent at a strong Indian institution with no foreign name attached at all, what the placement record shows once there is one to show.
None of this is an argument against foreign universities in India, and I don’t mean it as scepticism claiming to be rigour. It’s an argument against unquestioning enthusiasm in either direction. Some of these campuses will do well. Some will quietly struggle and quietly leave. The ones that last won’t necessarily be the most famous names – they’ll be the ones with a clear niche, leadership on the ground with real authority, and an actual willingness to be shaped by India rather than merely located in it.
None of this is an argument for waiting quietly and checking back in ten years, either. Regulators can require industry MOUs before a campus opens, not after. A university’s India operation can be evaluated now on how much design authority it’s actually been handed, and on what it’s doing to build a faculty culture rather than just a faculty roster. A student choosing this year between a foreign name and a strong Indian one can ask for whatever placement data already exists, thin as it may be, instead of accepting the parent campus’s numbers as a stand-in for its own. Waiting for trajectory to show itself isn’t a plan. Watching who gets hired, who gets design authority, and which employers sign on before the first cohort graduates – that’s available starting this admissions cycle, not five years from now.
Transnational education isn’t something India is importing. It’s something that has to actually grow here, and I think growing things need tending from the start, not a verdict deferred until the data eventually arrives.
