page_title: International branch campus
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: International branch campus / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: At the Main Gate, photographed by BlingBling10.
context_page_description: An international branch campus is a form of international higher education whereby one or more partnering institutions establishes a physical presence in a foreign location for the purpose of expanding global outreach and student exchange. Generally named for their "home" institution and offering undergraduate and graduate programs, graduating students are conferred degrees from one or all partnering institutions, dependent on the agreement. Instruction most often occurs in properties owned or leased by the foreign institution, sometimes with a local partner, and may also include additional services and facilities to mirror Western universities. IBCs are delivered in many formats and currently exist all over the world. As a relatively new method of delivering post-secondary education, IBCs have been deemed successful and yet face continual criticism.
context_section_description: While the internationalization of higher education is considered a contemporary phenomenon, it has a variety of historical roots. During the colonial era, the practice of setting up "branch" institutions in foreign countries or sponsoring schools in the colonies was commonplace, serving the most basic purposes characteristic of the period. This practice continued into the nineteenth century by American Protestant missionaries, who established colleges grounded in the U.S. model in countries such as Egypt, Turkey and Lebanon, practices from which the American University of Beirut was founded. In a broader sense, higher education institutions have long held global orientations, in that they served international students, employed professors from different countries, and functioned chiefly in the common language of Latin.
  Close resemblances of the contemporary branch campus model emerged in the early twentieth century. At this time, these campuses functioned primarily to serve U.S. military and civilian personnel in the U.S.-owned Canal Zone. Florida State University, among other institutions, began providing this type of cross-border program as early 1933. In the 1950s, Johns Hopkins University opened a branch campus in Italy which is now considered the oldest established branch campus still in operation. The first concentration of branch campuses in a single country was established in Japan during the 1980s for various diplomatic reasons.  Wanting to improve the relationship between Japan and the United States, the Japanese government recruited several U.S. universities to establish branch campuses on its soil, of which nearly 30 did in cooperation with Japanese institutions or private companies. Only one of these campuses remain today; the rest mostly closing due to inconvenient locations and difficulties in English language instruction.
  International branch campuses began to proliferate in the mid-1990s and further into the twenty-first century. The first non-American institution to establish a branch campus in the modern era was French Fashion University that opened in Norway in 1990. The rest of the 1990s saw a wave of diversifying institutions expanding abroad, primarily from Australia, Mexico, Chile, Ireland, Canada, Italy, the UK, and Sweden; to target areas in Africa, Southeast and East Asia, the Middle East and South America. There were approximately 50 IBCs at the end of the '90s boom (not including those in the Japanese bubble), reaching 183 in 2011. Seen by some as an extraordinary form of privatization in the public sector (largely due to the geographic separation from the state), as of 2015 there are 282 branch campuses worldwide. Not included in this figure are the range of for-profit providers, such as The Apollo Group through the University of Phoenix, who now has campuses in Mexico, India, Latin America and parts of Europe.
caption: American University of Beirut
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