Universities’ Foreign Investment on Stony Ground? Offshore Campus Development in Malaysia and Singapore Between Sector Opening and Closure

Many countries worldwide have opened their higher education sectors for foreign universities’ investment in offshore subsidiaries since the 1990s. Today, a broad range of private higher education providers can be found: offshore campuses, e.g., offer foreign degrees that can be fully studied on-site. Such offshore campus projects usually come with differing goals, interests and risks for involved actors, and are interconnected with greater processes of national and global socio-economic restructuring as well as with changes in separated, yet crosscutting, policy domains. As offshore campus projects have been developed particularly early and numerous in Malaysia and Singapore, these states have had various and differing experiences with the integration of foreign universities and the (de-/re-) regulation of higher education sectors.

This economic-geographic research project investigated why and how the higher education sectors in Malaysia and Singapore have been selectively opened to foreign universities’ investment in subsidiaries. It is shown how and why the on-site conditions that enable and shape offshore campus development change over time. A special theoretic-conceptual focus of the project is on building an understanding of regulation that goes beyond narrow notions of quality assurance. Offshore campus development is consideredf as a process through which territorial and network spaces interact, are reconfigured and newly intertwined.

The research project was conducted by Marc Schulze from spring 2019 to spring 2023. It was part of the third-party funded project ‘Constructing Transnational Spaces of Higher Education’ at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space. Marc Schulze’s publication format PhD thesis at the Geography Department of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin was supervised by Prof Jana Kleibert.