Offshore campuses can be serious cashcows for Western universities

South Sydney’s Woollongong University (WU) opened a campus in Dubai sixteen years ago which educates thousands of students from multiple countries and is now known as one of the United Arab Emirates' "oldest and most prestigious universities", showing just how well-regarded degrees from Australian (and other Western countries’) universities have become abroad. The international program has been so successful for WU that it now boasts campuses in Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia, as well as Dubai, meaning over 50% of WU’s students are located outside Australia and pay steep international student fees. While many Western universities have set up overseas campuses, not all enjoy the success WU has achieved, although such a move is seen as a risk worth taking for extra revenue streams and marketing opportunities.

At Wollongong University's booming Dubai campus, thousands of students from scores of countries are studying – in English – for undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in business, finance, IT, engineering and media. Operating as an accredited university for just 16 years, UOWD is billed as one of the United Arab Emirates' "oldest and most prestigious universities" – a small sign of the pace of change in the area of transnational education – and of the market value of an Australian degree.

Wollongong has more than 11,000 international students, and more than half of them study at the university's overseas locations, in the UAE, Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia. Fees are about the same as international students pay in Wollongong.

University of Wollongong in Dubai enrolments have surged by 41 per cent in the past five years.

Over the past five years, Wollongong Dubai's enrolments have surged by 41 per cent.

It's the flipside of Australia's well-known international student boom, where the past decade has seen extraordinary growth in overseas students coming to live and study in Australia, injecting $19 billion into our economy in 2015. Australia is the third most popular destination for international students globally, after the US and Britain. But a number of Australian universities – notably Wollongong, Monash, Curtin and RMIT – have invested heavily in the risky business of offshore campuses, and are thriving.