UK sector urged to approach Indian TNE ‘with sceptic’s hat on’

UK universities cannot be “naïve” or “too trusting” as they embark on risky forays into India, a conference has heard.

David Pilsbury, chief development officer at Oxford International Education Group, said institutions should learn from the past on branch campuses and manage their expectations accordingly.

“We forget that most [transnational education] developments these days have to step over the dead bodies of UK and Australian hopes that died in the sand,” he told the India-UK Achievers conference in London. “The Australians were essentially stopped from doing TNE because so many of them lost money in South-east Asia in the early 2000s.”

While describing himself as “an enthusiast for TNE for more than 20 years”, Pilsbury said success requires realism rather than rhetoric.

“It really requires a relentless focus on the realities of it, and I’m sorry but we are such a lovely sector full of so many nice people that we are essentially naïve, unsophisticated and too trusting,” he said.

He also challenged assumptions that opening in India represents automatic growth in revenue.

“What is the rhetoric? It is a vast and unpenetrated market… And actually the reality is it’s a very price sensitive, brand discerning and highly competitive market.”

He also cautioned against seeing India campuses as protection against domestic instability.

“Is it a hedge against UK volatility? Well actually, as anybody who’s played in the TNE game knows, it’s a long-term strategy that requires your institution to get behind it, to be in for the bad times as well as the good, not to be deflected, and then you will yield the returns.”

Institutions, he added, must avoid over-optimistic modelling. “Please don’t give me student volumes and revenue shares that aren’t based on cold-eyed reality. We are inherently optimistic in our sector. You need to put your sceptic’s hat on and really look hard at those numbers.”

The warning came alongside fresh enrolment data that showed a continuing decline in onshore international students to the UK.

Dina Zaher, head of partnerships at Enroly, a UK-based enrolment and compliance platform, said “overall Confirmation of Acceptance for Studies issuance is down by about 23 per cent” for the January 2026 intake compared with the previous year, meaning universities have sponsored roughly 23 per cent fewer students for January entry. However, “visa refusals have not been impacted too much”.

Separate data tracking tuition payments suggested wider competitive pressures.

Simon Read, senior vice-president at Flywire, a global payments company that processes tuition fee transactions for universities, said “you can start to see the total really for India and China falling gradually year on year”, and that “the combined total of the big four [referring to the UK, US, Australia and Canada] is dropping”.

Agents on the panel described shifting student behaviour. Srinivas Lagadapati, founder of Leo Global, said “more than 60 per cent of students plan to study in a particular university” and that students are looking more at which universities are offering “placement opportunities”.

The discussion comes as UK institutions expand activity in India following regulatory reforms allowing foreign branch campuses.

Pilsbury noted that while regulatory reform is “real”, it is ongoing and has already seen “pushback from Indian institutions, both public and private sector”, adding that “it’s not easy”.

tash.mosheim@timeshighereducation.com