Columbia Aims to Gain Global Clout, but With Its Own Model

If there is one sector of the internationalized landscape of higher education in which Columbia seems to lag behind other schools, it is its physical presence.

Despite a recent trend of new American university outposts overseas, Columbia has stuck with a more modest model of extension in conjunction with existing foreign universities, rather than building from the ground up.

Satellite campuses, or physical outposts of American universities in foreign countries where international students register and American students can travel to study, have proliferated in recent years as schools have seen opportunities for increased revenues abroad. The hot spot for such developments is the Middle East, where lavish endowments from local governments have created academic centers in Abu Dhabi and Qatar. In Qatar, the cluster includes branches of five American schools—Weill Cornell Medical College, Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, Texas A&M’s engineering school, Carnegie Mellon University’s business management and computer science program, and Virginia Commonwealth University’s arts and sciences school—as well as a Canadian and a Dutch university. Another center is Singapore, where the University of Chicago offers an executive MBA program.

In the global scheme, these enterprises are only the tip of the iceberg, as many international universities have undertaken more creative endeavors, according to Philip Altbach, director of Boston College’s Center for International Higher Education. Other arrangements include “franchising,” in which more-prestigious schools lend their names to degrees from other universities, a scenario that Altbach refers to as “McDonaldization.”

Columbia has made few strides to build internationally on a grand scale, preferring instead to build partnerships with existing institutions, though Provost Alan Brinkley said that the University considered an opportunity to build a mini-university in the Middle East before NYU brokered such a deal with Abu Dhabi this summer.

“We have not yet been convinced that we would be able to maintain the quality that we have at Columbia—hiring faculty, recruiting students, organizing curricula—anywhere else but here,” said Nicholas Dirks, vice president of arts and sciences. “We don’t know how we would do in the Gulf or in Singapore. What we do think we could do is something else, which would be a model which Columbia could establish on its own.”

University President Lee Bollinger described potential branch campuses as a later stage of a process of spreading Columbia’s influence, which is already underway with joint-degree and professorship arrangements with certain international universities. Notable international programs include Columbia’s five-year dual B.A. and M.A. program with Sciences Po in Paris.

“We’re trying to use them now to see them as the kind of scaffolding for the construction of a very different set of networks,” Dirks said.

“You imagine 10 years out that Manhattan is Columbia’s home, but that there’s also Columbia—Paris, Columbia in Tel Aviv, in Jordan, in Dare Salaam, and it’s the same kind of thing but we take students from there, we take faculty from there,” explained Bollinger.

According to Altbach, Columbia’s measured approach to global extensions may not be a bad decision. Such programs are often fraught with controversy, as evidenced by last year’s collapse of a Johns Hopkins University research partnership in Singapore over funding disputes.

“Everyone’s either thinking of it or doing it,” he said. “It’s growing with reasonable speed and my hope is with reasonable care.”

Bollinger speculated that this process of physically integrating Columbia into the world will change the nature of the school.

“Are we by the end of the 21st century 150,000 students with campuses all over the globe?” he asked. “Because if you look at 100 years ago, Columbia was a small, 4,000-student, 400-faculty, more or less, Morningside Heights, little New York City operation.”

Jacob Schneider can be reached at jacob.schneider@columbiaspectator.com.