Universities have gotten very good at opening international branch campuses. They haven’t yet figured out who should teach in them, and that gap is becoming one of the defining challenges of global higher education.
The scale of the shift
Transnational education has moved from experimental to mainstream at remarkable speed. Institutions from nearly 40 home countries now export degrees directly through 384 international branch campuses spread across 85 host nations, with China alone hosting 51 of them, more than any other country. Global higher education enrolment has more than doubled over the past two decades, reaching 269 million students in 2024, a surge that keeps pushing demand for internationally recognised qualifications and encouraging more institutions to expand overseas.
New campuses in India, the Gulf, and Southeast Asia keep making headlines. What gets far less attention is a harder question sitting underneath all of it: how does a university sustain one academic standard when its teaching, research, and expertise are scattered across multiple countries and regulatory systems?
Why “flying faculty” is running out of road
For years, the default answer was simple — send academics from the home campus to teach abroad, on rotation, for short stints. That model is reaching its limit. Nigel Healey, a leading authority on transnational education, put it plainly: the era of seconded staff and flying faculty is largely over.
The reasons are structural, not just logistical. Seconding senior academics abroad is expensive and only realistic for the most senior staff. Career paths get complicated when a returning academic risks losing seniority at home. Relocating spouses and children adds friction most institutions aren’t set up to handle. And host countries increasingly have their own legal and cultural expectations — around academic freedom, and around the rights of women, religious minorities, and LGBTQ+ staff — that a rotating visiting-faculty model simply isn’t built to navigate consistently.
The result: branch campuses are shifting toward a mixed staffing model , a combination of local hires and third-country academics — rather than staff drawn primarily from the home institution.
The trade-off nobody advertises
This shift isn’t a talent shortage. The world’s universities graduate roughly 250,000 PhDs a year; there’s no absolute scarcity of qualified academics. The real issue is that branch-campus positions are often unattractive to academics from the exporting university itself, which means the staff base ends up drawn largely from local and third-country talent instead — and that talent frequently faces a different deal.
Local and third-country staff at branch campuses often carry heavier teaching loads, receive lower pay than their home-campus counterparts, and get fewer opportunities for research or professional development — since branch campuses are typically funded entirely through tuition, leaving little time or funding for research work. Universities are rarely eager to acknowledge these gaps publicly, but the effect shows up anyway: lower morale, higher turnover, and academics who treat a branch-campus post as a stepping stone rather than a destination.
Some institutions are managing this better than others. The University of Nottingham Malaysia, for instance, draws academic staff from more than 30 countries, with roughly 90% holding doctoral qualifications — and treats its UK, Malaysia, and China campuses as one integrated academic community rather than a hub with satellite outposts. That kind of integration, rather than staffing volume alone, appears to be what separates campuses that sustain academic quality from ones that quietly scale back.
Regulators are stepping in
Host-country regulators are increasingly forcing the issue. The UAE’s Commission for Academic Accreditation now requires branch-campus faculty to be research-active and to report publications and grants annually — a requirement that raises the cost base considerably, since institutions must compete for stronger academic staff and fund the research time to support them. India’s University Grants Commission, meanwhile, is approving more than 15 foreign universities to open campuses, and at institutions like Deakin University and the University of Southampton’s India campuses, most listed faculty are already Indian nationals — reflecting how much faculty identity matters to Indian parents choosing a university, often as much as fees or employability.
The bigger constraint
It would be a mistake to treat staffing as the only variable in play. Kevin Kinser, co-founder of the Cross-Border Education Research Team, argues that student demand, regulation, and geopolitics will shape transnational education’s future more than talent availability alone — pointing to how India’s growing openness to foreign campuses sits alongside regional instability elsewhere raising safety concerns for institutions weighing where to expand next.
What this means for institutions building global partnerships
For deans and university leaders evaluating a branch campus, a joint degree, or any international staffing model, the lesson is consistent: academic quality abroad isn’t a function of how much oversight the home campus retains. It’s a function of how deliberately an institution designs staffing, career pathways, and research support into the partnership from day one — rather than treating it as a logistics problem to solve after the campus opens.
The institutions getting this right aren’t the ones sending the most people abroad. They’re the ones building one coherent academic identity across every location they operate in.
Sources: QS Insights Magazine, “Who Teaches the Global University?” (15 July 2026); Cross-Border Education Research Team (C-BERT); UNESCO.