Indian branch campuses will not fill Australia’s looming China gap

Last week, several Australian universities, including UNSW Sydney, discussed their intentions to open campuses in India, as part of a ministerial delegation to the subcontinent. But this move is only one small part of a much wider set of adjustments that Australian universities can and must make in response to the changing global educational environment.

Key economic, political and social shifts are undermining the strategies that have served Australian universities well for the first quarter of the 21st century, particularly in the Indo-Pacific.

Quite apart from geopolitical uncertainties, China’s demographic transition means that there will be a sharp decline in its university-age population from the mid-2030s. Moreover, Chinese demand for an Australian education will be constrained well before that time by a welter of factors, including a slowdown in China’s economic growth, growing youth unemployment, expansion of high-quality domestic higher education provision and an increasing tendency for Chinese students to want to remain at home for their degrees.

Australian universities may respond by deepening efforts to recruit onshore students from other markets that do not face major demographic dips in coming years – and India, being the biggest, is the most obvious. However, these other countries have their own challenges, and the capacity of their middle classes to pay for a foreign education is limited. The economic phenomenon playing out in China – of relatively low levels of economic growth, constraining employers’ demand for graduates – is also characteristic of many other parts of the Indo-Pacific.

According to one survey, 42 per cent of Indian graduates under 25 were unemployed in 2023, and the figures for many parts of ASEAN and East Asia are typically over 10 per cent. Unemployment has even triggered youth uprisings, in Sri Lanka in 2022, Bangladesh in 2024, and Nepal and Indonesia in 2025. 

Such internal economic-political issues are shaped by, and in turn inform, wider geopolitical tensions. These conditions are hardly conducive to creating stable “pipelines” of students from countries across the Indo-Pacific into Australia.

Another likely response of Australian universities to these difficulties will be to launch branch campuses – not just in India but across the region. This strategy offers a means to pursue a different market segment: those capable of paying foreign university fees but not wealthy enough to migrate abroad.

Branch campuses are also a crucial dimension of Australian universities’ capacity to contribute to the Indo-Pacific and build relationships. When done right, they can act as anchor institutions, providing scientific, social and economic benefits to surrounding society. This can build international social licence for Australian universities and foster cross-border trust, enhancing Australia’s soft power in the region.

Moreover, it is our experience at Monash University that international campuses, when fully integrated into the life of the university, greatly enrich the work of the home institution, too, bringing crucial intellectual and social benefits. Yet branch campuses are no magic bullet. They take decades, not years, to become fully successful. And for any universities that seek to rely on external education companies for teaching delivery, the quality risks are great. 

International campus establishment has always required resilience and flexibility. But in the current climate, there is the additional risk that universities get drawn more tightly into a thicket of economic, political and geopolitical issues that they might not fully comprehend and are already struggling to manage – especially during the fledgling years of new campuses abroad.

In fact, the most effective way for Australia to begin to navigate the new higher education environment in the late 2020s and 2030s is likely to be the particular form of transnational education (TNE) wherein students complete a part of their studies in their home country and the remainder in Australia. Monash pioneered such “twinning” arrangements in the 1990s, working with a Malaysian university. But they, too, require very careful management. And they come with the risk that universities develop an ever-expanding list of memoranda of understanding at the expense of focused work.

In our experience, people and organisations tend to overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10. Australian universities need to lift their gaze now and think about how to use the next decade to prepare for the significant likely downturn in the number of Chinese students willing and able to study in Australia for a whole degree.

Diversification, international campuses and TNE will also be crucial ways to respond. Much is possible. But it will require careful navigation, plotting a course on a moving terrain.

Craig Jeffrey is deputy vice-chancellor (international) and senior vice-president at Monash University, where Michael Simmonds is chief global engagement adviser and director, north Asia, and Donald Speagle is university secretary and executive director, governance, risk and policy.