Some interesting stats from the UK Higher Education International Unit
The International Unit recently published its summary of International higher education in facts and figures – Winter 2012-13. The report contains some interesting information which covers the majority of the UK higher education sector. One particular table (on page 9 of the report) caught my eye, the number of UK students involved in different forms of trans-national education (TNE):
(Note that the data covers the 2010-11 session.)
Three particular points of interest in here:
- Students registered at Oxford Brookes University accounted for 47.6% of the total population of the 2010-11 Aggregate Offshore record. The majority of these students were registered with an overseas partner on Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) programmes.
- In 2010-11 the University of Nottingham returned 7,797 students at its two overseas campuses, the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus and University of Nottingham Ningbo China, so nearly two thirds of the total number of students in this category are from Nottingham.
- The number and proportion of students following distance learning courses can only grow.
It’s historical data but no doubt the next set of figures will show growth across all of these categories.
Thanks for posting this – the report is interesting.
Do these data perhaps suggest that the model of an overseas campus has not been popular and is unlikely to develop much further, if only Nottingham is making serious use of it? We’d need to look at a couple of years before this, too.
I’m not sure that these data can show that the number and proportion of students following distance learning courses can only grow – again, we’d need to look at trends but we’d also need to know about the motivations of students taking this option.
It is probably not a good idea to make too many assumptions based on one data point but I do think there remains significant interest in the UK growing branch campus provision – it’s just that Nottingham has a head start and has grown very quickly (indeed we are now at nearly 10,000 students across the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus and University of Nottingham Ningbo China).
I was just being mischievous.Snapshot data wouldn’t answer any of my questions! It is interesting though – Newcastle has a branch campus in Singapore now, but otherwise there has been little interest in doing things on the scale you’ve attempted.