Understanding the Mutating ‘Third Wave’: Comparing the Drivers of Remote Metropolitan Branch Campuses and International Branch Campuses

For several decades, universities in the UK have been growing and diversifying their revenue by recruiting international students. There have been three sequential waves of internationalisation – export education, then franchising degrees to private providers overseas, and finally the establishment of international branch campuses (IBCs) around the world. More recently, there has been a mutation of this ‘third wave’ with an increasing number of UK universities setting up remote metropolitan branch campuses (RMBCs) in London. This paper compares the motivations of UK universities establishing RMBCs and IBCs. It finds that while there are broad parallels between the reasons for starting an RMBC and an IBC, there are important differences of emphasis and impact. It also finds that RMBCs offer universities a valuable ‘experimental laboratory’ on home soil to pilot new curricula, pedagogies and operating models, which are potentially transferrable back to the home campus.