Towards a New Framework for Analysing Transnational Education

What is it about?

The well-documented growth of international student mobility has been paralleled by the emergence of so-called ‘transnational education’ (TNE), in which universities deliver their educational services to foreign students in their own countries, rather than the students travelling to the foreign university to study. While universities have engaged in limited TNE for decades, using a variety of channels from traditional distance-learning to partnership-based models in which a third party delivers a franchised or validated programme, TNE has expanded significantly over the last 15 years. This paper investigates the increasingly complexity and multidimensionality of TNE partnerships, developing a new three-spectrum framework for classifying this activity. It argues that this new framework provides a more tractable way of classifying and understanding the ‘new internationalisation’ of higher education.

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