Slowing down to go faster: Australian universities are making their biggest offshore bets in decades

Australian universities are being pulled in two directions at once. At home, they face intense scrutiny over international student settings, institutional risk, governance, quality, and financial resilience. Offshore, they are being encouraged to expand faster, further, and more ambitiously than at any point in recent memory.

The result is a contradiction. At the very moment Australian higher education is retreating into itself at the domestic level, transnational education is becoming open season. Universities that are cautious in almost every other domain are making big bets on branch campuses, offshore partnerships, joint delivery models and new international markets. Some of these bets may pay off. Many are strategically necessary. But few are simple, and none are risk-free.

Transnational education is hardly new. Australian universities have delivered programs overseas for decades, often through partner institutions or pathway arrangements. What’s changed is the scale and strategic importance of the endeavour. Institutions are no longer treating offshore delivery as a supplementary revenue stream or a useful adjunct to international recruitment. They are increasingly treating it as a core part of their institutional strategy.

Demand for high-quality higher education is growing across Asia and the Middle East. India, in particular, has become a focus for Australian institutions as its higher education system expands and its policy settings become more open to foreign providers. Deakin University, the University of Wollongong, the University of New South Wales, Victoria University, and University of Western Australia have all opened or will open campuses by the end of 2026. These are indications that offshore delivery for Australian universities is entering a new phase.

The government wants the sector’s offshore efforts to succeed. High-quality transnational education can diversify institutional revenue, broaden access to Australian qualifications, deepen regional relationships, and extend Australia’s influence in strategically important markets. In a period when onshore international education is politically contested, offshore delivery can look like an elegant solution. There are fewer migration pressures, wider reach, and the promise of global engagement without the same domestic friction.

But enthusiasm should not be confused with readiness. The sector’s current approach risks putting the deal before the discipline. Many universities are moving quickly to secure partners, locations and market positions before they have built the institutional infrastructure needed to manage complex offshore activity over time.

History should make universities wary. Transnational education has a long record of optimism colliding with operational reality. Revenue is often overestimated. Costs are often underestimated. Partner incentives are often assumed to be aligned until they aren’t. Regulatory environments change and political conditions shift, and students expect a different version of quality compared to what they would receive onshore. Local labour markets, tax settings, property arrangements, academic standards, staffing models, and technology platforms all introduce complexity.

None of this hypothetical. The markets that offer the greatest opportunities all carry meaningful risk profiles. They may be fast-growing, strategically important, and full of ‘demand’, but they are also politically, legally, and operationally distinct from Australia. A university cannot simply export its domestic operating model and expect it to work in foreign climes. Offshore delivery requires local intelligence, mature partnerships, and sophisticated governance. It requires a clear view of what the institution will do when circumstances change.

The regulatory environment is also tightening. Changes to the TEQSA Act require providers to obtain and maintain authorisation for offshore higher education delivery, notify TEQSA of new offshore courses and certain changes, and submit annual reports on offshore activity. TEQSA’s authorisation process is extensive as it covers governance, academic governance, staffing, learning resources, delivery with other parties, student support, integrity, and quality assurance. At one level these requirements seem reasonable, but they will add cost and complexity to activity that is already financially marginal and complex for many educational institutions.

Universities must also contend with in-country regulators, local accreditation requirements, partner governance arrangements and the practical realities of delivering Australian education in another jurisdiction. Too often, due diligence focuses on the market opportunity and the headline economics without fully accounting for the real cost of operating, assuring and exiting the arrangement.

The most important question is not whether Australian universities should pursue transnational education. The more important question is whether they have the capability to do it well. Many, as yet, do not. In a global study by Nous and Navitas, we found that less than half of the sector felt it has the skill to deliver successful transnational education.

While the sector has pockets of genuine expertise, institutional maturity is uneven. Some universities have spent decades building a transnational education culture, with dedicated teams, clear decision rights, offshore operating models, mature partner management, sophisticated quality assurance, and council-level understanding of geopolitical and commercial risk. Others have a patchwork of activity dispersed across faculties, international offices, legal teams, academic governance committees, and executive portfolios.

That patchwork may work for small-scale partnerships, but it won’t work for large offshore campuses or strategically significant delivery models. Branch campuses and major partnerships require an operating model that answers basic but difficult questions like who owns the commercial result, who controls academic quality, who manages partner performance, who carries regulatory accountability, who escalates risk, and who has authority to pause, redesign or exit the arrangement?

They also require stronger governance at the top of the institution. Councils and senior executives need transnational education literacy to interrogate assumptions, not merely approve strategies. They need to understand the difference between a plausible growth story and a resilient operating plan, and to test whether revenue forecasts are realistic, whether cost models include regulatory and opportunity costs, whether quality assurance is genuinely enforceable, and whether the institution understands the country risk it is accepting.

Abandoning offshore ambition is obviously not the solution. Rather, institutions may need to slow down in order to properly realise the benefits of transnational education. Some may argue the opposite, given institutional inertia is a known problem in the sector. But the point is not to move less ambitiously. It is to make sure the ambition is matched by the governance, capability and discipline needed to sustain it.

Universities should begin by strengthening council and executive governance before approving major offshore commitments. That means building a clearer understanding of transnational education risk, establishing explicit approval thresholds, and ensuring decision-makers receive independent advice on commercial, academic, geopolitical, and regulatory exposure. It also means being more sceptical of business cases that are too often built on optimistic demand forecasts, thin cost assumptions and underdeveloped views of delivery risk.

They should also be ready to conduct due diligence that could be genuinely uncomfortable. Good due diligence does not simply validate the case for expansion. It tests the assumptions most likely to fail. In the case of higher education, it examines student demand, pricing, partner incentives, local regulation, staffing, tax, property, data, technology, quality assurance, brand risk, and, crucially, exit conditions. It should include downside scenarios and make explicit what would trigger a change in course.

Universities should also define their operating model before they sign any deals. Some institutions may need a separate enterprise or dedicated offshore delivery vehicle. Others may be able to manage activity through a centralised transnational education function. There is no single right answer. But there must be an answer. Ambiguity may be convenient, but it becomes dangerous once students, staff, regulators and partners are relying on the arrangement, and things start to go wrong.

Finally, universities should build exit strategies into every major arrangement. Partnerships are often treated as permanent commitments, but many are better understood as contingent structures that work only while incentives, conditions and capabilities remain aligned. A mature institution knows not only how to enter a market, but also how to leave one that minimises damage students, staff, partners or its reputation.

Government shouldn’t encourage offshore expansion, celebrate its strategic benefits, then leave universities to carry the full burden of execution. Regulation is necessary, but so is government support. If transnational education is meant to advance Australia’s economic and soft-power interests, government needs to be an active player, not just turn up for the ribbon cutting.

Its support should reflect a more serious view of transnational education. Other countries like China and Singapore are treating offshore education as part of national strategy, linking universities with trade, diplomacy, workforce development, and long-term influence. Australia is still too reliant on institutional initiative and market-by-market improvisation. Better intelligence and regulatory guidance would help, but the bigger need is a national capability that helps universities choose where to compete, understand what risks they are carrying, and avoid being outflanked by systems that are more coordinated than ours.

The gap is not simply coordination. It is the absence of shared infrastructure for making better offshore decisions. Austrade, international education bodies and sector associations are all doing useful work, but universities still lack the practical intelligence, risk benchmarks, partnership insights, and delivery know-how needed to compete in this new frontier. If Australia wants to be more than an opportunistic participant in transnational education, it needs to build the system around the ambition.

Australian universities are right to look offshore. The demand is there, largely at a much lower price, and the strategic case is strong. But the next phase of transnational education will not reward speed alone. It will reward institutions that combine ambition with discipline.

The universities that succeed will not be the ones that sign the most deals or announce the most campuses, but rather those that understand where they are taking risks then build the capability to manage it, knowing when to pause, and to get out. They are the ones that treat governance, due diligence, operating models, and exit strategies as the foundations of sustainable global education.

There is a simple lesson for the sector here which is sometimes you have to slow down to go faster. In the case of transnational education, that may be the difference between a bold strategy and an expensive mistake.

Get in touch to discuss how your institution can build the governance, capability and discipline needed to make offshore education a sustainable success.

Connect with Zac Ashkanasy on LinkedIn.