Internationalization of Higher Education Foreign university campuses in India By Ranjan Sarkar
We Sent Our Best Away. What If They Didn’t Have to Leave?
There’s a moment many Indian families know well. The results come in, the applications go out, and then — if everything goes right — there’s a flight. London, maybe. Or Boston. Toronto. Sydney. The family saves for years, sometimes sells property, sometimes takes loans they’ll spend a decade repaying. And the child goes. Because that’s what you do when you want the best education in the world. You leave.
This has been India’s quiet, painful reality for decades. Not a failure exactly — the engineers and doctors and researchers who left went on to do extraordinary things. They built companies, won awards, ran hospitals, shaped policy in countries that were lucky to have them. But somewhere in that success story was also a loss. A loss that India never quite named out loud.
Now something is shifting. And it’s worth paying attention to.
The world is showing up
Deakin University. University of Southampton. Setting up campuses at GIFT City in Gujarat. A few years ago, this would have seemed unlikely. Foreign universities don’t just pack up and move to another country. They go where the conditions are right, where the students are, where there’s something in it for them — and increasingly, that place is India.
This isn’t just an education story. It’s a signal. A small but meaningful one that says: India is no longer only a place that sends talent out into the world. It might be becoming a place the world wants to come to.
That’s a different kind of story. And it’s one India has earned the right to tell — just not fully yet.
We built scale. Now we need something else.
Here’s the honest truth about Indian higher education: for a long time, the goal was volume. More colleges. More seats. More graduates. And that made sense for a country of India’s size, coming out of independence with enormous need and limited resources.
The IITs and IIMs became world-famous — but they were the exceptions, not the rule. For every IIT graduate celebrated globally, there were thousands of students passing through colleges where the infrastructure was old, the teaching was uninspiring, and the outcome was a degree that didn’t quite prepare them for what the world actually needed.
The system wasn’t broken. It did what it was designed to do. But what it was designed to do is no longer enough.
The jobs of the next twenty years won’t just reward people who can memorize and reproduce. They’ll reward people who can think across disciplines, ask uncomfortable questions, and create things that haven’t existed before. That’s not something you can build with scale alone. It needs a different kind of institution — one that values curiosity as much as credentials.
What good internationalization actually looks like
When people hear “international universities coming to India,” they sometimes picture it as a status thing. A foreign brand. A shinier option for families who can afford it.
But that’s the least interesting version of what this could be.
The more interesting version is what happens when an Indian researcher gets to collaborate with a team in Melbourne or Southampton without leaving Ahmedabad. When a student in Gujarat gets access to teaching methods and perspectives that used to require a visa. When the presence of high-quality institutions — domestic or foreign — creates pressure on every other institution to raise its game.
That’s what happened in Singapore. In South Korea. Countries that were once, like India, significant exporters of students and talent. They decided to build universities of genuine global standing — not by copying someone else’s curriculum, but by combining world-class standards with a clear sense of what they were building it *for*. The National University of Singapore didn’t become one of the world’s top twenty by pretending to be an American university. It became great by being seriously, rigorously itself — while engaging with the best the world had to offer.
India can do this. The talent is here. The numbers are here. The hunger is very much here.
But let’s be honest about the risks
None of this is guaranteed to go well just because the intention is good.
If the foreign campuses that arrive in India serve only the students whose families were already going to find a way abroad — if they become expensive enclaves that the majority of Indian students will never touch — then the transformation stays cosmetic. A few more options for the privileged few, while the vast middle of Indian higher education stays exactly where it is.
There’s another risk that’s quieter but just as real. If India starts treating international as synonymous with *better* — if the implicit lesson becomes that quality education is something that comes from somewhere else — then we risk building a dependence instead of a capability. The goal has to be partnership. Learning from the best, yes. But building something of our own that the world eventually wants to learn from too.
The policy frameworks need to reflect this. Foreign institutions operating in India should be genuine contributors to the local academic ecosystem — through research partnerships, faculty exchange, real knowledge transfer. Not just branch offices collecting fees.
The deeper question
Underneath all of this is something more personal. More human.
Can India build universities that are world-class *and* deeply Indian? That produce research which matters globally while staying rooted in the realities of this country — its languages, its social complexity, its particular mix of ancient wisdom and urgent modernity?
That’s the real ambition. Not imitation. Not importing someone else’s version of excellence and calling it our own. But building something that is genuinely ours — rigorous, curious, open to the world, and proud of where it comes from.
India has everything it needs to do this. The scale. The talent. The young population that will be the world’s largest for decades. The diaspora that never really left in spirit, even when it left in body. The stories — millions of them — of families who sacrificed everything so their children could have access to the best.
Those families deserved better options at home. The generation coming up behind them still does.
The students who once had to board a flight to find a world-class education — maybe their younger siblings won’t have to. Maybe the world will come to them instead.
But only if India decides to build something worth coming to.
That work starts now. And it’s less about policy than it is about belief — the belief that Indian institutions can be not just good enough, but genuinely great. That we don’t need to keep sending our best away to prove that we have them.
We do. It’s time to build the places that keep them here.