More than 50 foreign universities have set up shop in the Arab region — primarily in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. These branch campuses represent some of the top universities from around the world, including the University of Cambridge, Cornell University and University College London.

The influx of institutions helps satisfy rapidly growing demand for higher education in the region — college enrollment climbed from below 10 percent to nearly 30 percent between 1980 and 2010, according to the World Bank — and gives students more options for where and what to study.

But there are drawbacks to attending a regional branch of a foreign school, too, so students should be savvy consumers when weighing where to attend university, says Jason Lane, associate professor of education policy at the University at Albany–SUNY and co-director of C-BERT, a research group that studies branch campuses.

One of the primary factors students should evaluate before enrolling in a branch campus is the stability of the university, says Lane, who likened the push by foreign universities into the region to the Wild West.

[Get advice on paying for higher education in the Arab region.]

“There was a lot of rushing in and not as much forethought and planning about what was needed to be successful,” he says.

As a result, several branch campuses shuttered programs within a few years of opening, including George Mason University and Michigan State University, where Lane completed a Fulbright in 2009, shortly before the university closed its undergraduate program in the region.

“These were essentially startup companies,” Lane says. “Even though they were part of long, historic, complex organizations back home, branches were startup organizations and there was bound to be failure.”

The University of Massachusetts–Lowell, which recently announced a new branch campus at the Gulf University for Science and Technology in Kuwait, hopes to head off some of the challenges faced by the first wave of universities in the Arab region, says Ahmed Abdelal, the university’s provost.

“We learned a good deal from talking with other institutions,” including the need for long-term funding, steady enrollment and regular full-time faculty, Abdelal said via email.

Branch campuses — even the new ones — have largely stabilized, says Lane, from C-BERT, but students should still research enrollment and graduating classes.

“If they’ve graduated a set of students, it’s a good sign of stability,” he says.

Smaller enrollment numbers can also be a benefit of branch campuses, notes Allan Goodman, president of the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit that studies education around the world.

UMass–Lowell plans to enroll only 2,000 students, Abdelal notes. That’s almost 245,000 fewer students than Cairo University, which enrolled nearly 247,000 undergraduate students for the 2009-2010 school year, according to the school’s website.

“That means that most students never actually see a professor or enter a classroom, physically,” Goodman says. “As giant national universities become overwhelmed, you need alternatives where real teaching happens with more interaction. That happens when you have more universities.”

Branch campuses from foreign universities often teach in the same style and language as the home country, and offer liberal arts degrees that may not be widely available in the host country.

[See how higher education is evolving in the Arab region.]

In many countries, students’ academic paths are dictated by their performance on a national exam. Their score determines whether they can study medicine, engineering, law or another field. Branch campuses give these students more flexibility in what they can study, Goodman says.

It also means that foreign residents, who don’t have access to national universities in most countries, can still attend college locally, Lane adds, noting that both the Middle East in general and the Gulf States in particular have large expatriate populations.

Because of their concerted effort to court foreign universities — and proximity to Africa and India — Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have also become a regional destination for higher education, Lane says.

These foreign students, combined with expats enrolled in the region, can give branch campuses a diverse student body not seen at national universities. That isn’t always the case, though. At some Indian branch campuses in the region, for example, the student body is primarily international students from India, Lane notes.

The diversity of the student body plays a large role in the culture of the institution, which can be a benefit or a drawback of branch campuses, depending on the student, he adds.

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“Domestic institutions are going to be much more reflective of the home culture, in terms of separation of genders and the types of inquiry that might occur in classrooms,” he says, “versus campuses from another country that will adapt to the local culture in a way that melds the two.”

Students who prefer a more traditional experience may be better suited to a national university, he says, advising students to evaluate what is important to them.

Beyond culture and academic offerings, students should also consider their long-term goals and where they want to live and work after graduation, says Goodman, from the Institute of International Education.

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Weigh the Benefits, Drawbacks of Branch Campuses in Arab Region originally appeared on usnews.com