New Directions in the Globalization of Higher Education
In this article:
Global higher education is entering a new phase focused on scaling ideas, capabilities, and innovation.
New models are helping universities extend innovation beyond their own campuses.
Ideas and innovation are increasingly flowing in multiple directions across borders.
Institutional know-how is becoming an important global asset.
For decades, globalization in higher education was largely about the movement of people. Universities recruited international students, expanded study abroad, developed exchange agreements, and competed to attract faculty and researchers from around the world.
A second phase followed. Universities began moving the institution itself. They created international branch campuses, joint and dual degrees, online programs, and other forms of transnational education that allowed students to access a university experience and faculty without traveling to its home country.
Now a third phase may be emerging.
Increasingly, what moves across borders is not simply the student or the degree. It is the ideas, capabilities, practices, and institutional innovations of universities themselves. Recent initiatives suggest at least three emerging models for how institutions are beginning to make that happen.
Here are three leading examples in this new space.
Arizona State University + Cintana Education: The University as a Platform
The university-as-platform model asks: How can capabilities developed by one institution be made available to many others?
Perhaps the most developed example is Arizona State University and Cintana Education.
In 2019, ASU and Cintana joined to form the ASU-Cintana Alliance, combining ASU’s academic resources and approach to innovation with Cintana founder Doug Becker’s experience building global education networks. The goal was to create a model through which ASU could extend its educational resources and expertise to universities worldwide.
The network has grown rapidly. In 2022, the Alliance included 14 universities reaching more than 100,000 students. By November 2025, ASU reported that the Alliance had grown to 34 partner universities serving more than 360,000 students worldwide, with a stated goal of reaching 65 institutions by 2030.
The diversity of the network helps bring the model to life. It includes institutions such as Chitkara University and Shiv Nadar University in India; Mapúa University in the Philippines; Sunway University in Malaysia; Chiba Institute of Technology in Japan; Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara in Mexico; and Galala University in Egypt. It also includes newly created institutions such as American University Kyiv and the American University of Technology in Uzbekistan, which opened in October 2024.
The model is continuing to evolve. In November 2025, ASU and Cintana announced two new initiatives in Kazakhstan: an International Honors College at the existing Auezov University and InnoTech University, a new private university being built from the ground up. InnoTech is being developed by ASU, Cintana, Q Education Group and Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Science and Higher Education, with a focus on technology, innovation and programs responsive to the country's evolving economy. Initial dual-degree pathways, expected to enroll students beginning in fall 2026, will span fields including engineering, digital technologies and entrepreneurship. The initiative demonstrates how the platform can be used not only to strengthen existing universities but also to help create entirely new institutions.
Partner institutions gain access to a broader platform of academic and institutional resources. Partner universities can draw on curriculum and content from more than 200 ASU online degree programs. Relationships can also include dual and accelerated degrees, faculty and research collaborations, guest lectures, English-language instruction, student exchanges, hybrid and blended learning resources, and faculty development. Cintana complements these academic resources with its own expertise and services in areas including strategic planning, academic program development, recruiting and marketing, new-market development and international expansion.
The model is fundamentally different from establishing an international branch campus. ASU does not have to reproduce itself in each country, and partner institutions do not have to build every new capability independently. Instead, they can draw selectively on ASU’s academic resources and institutional experience, combined with Cintana’s global higher education expertise, while remaining distinct institutions rooted in their own markets and communities.
The model also suggests a broader way to think about the assets of a university. A university’s value extends beyond the research produced by its faculty, the courses in its catalog, or even its brand. It also resides in the institutional expertise accumulated over time: how to design new programs, teach effectively online, develop faculty, support students, build research partnerships, enter new markets, and create the structures and systems that allow innovation to succeed. The ASU-Cintana model demonstrates one way that this institutional expertise can become a global resource rather than remaining contained within a single university.
Duke’s Future Universities Alliance: The University as Convener
The university-as-convener model asks: How can innovations developed across many different institutions be identified, strengthened, and moved between them?
Duke University's Future Universities Alliance begins from a different premise.
Rather than asking how the capabilities of one university can be extended to many others, Duke is asking how innovations developed at universities around the world can be connected, tested, adapted, and spread. Duke describes the Alliance as a “pluralistic, open-source network” in which institutions learn from one another and adapt promising ideas to their own contexts rather than attempting to export a single model of higher education.
The Alliance grew out of Duke's New Global Universities Summit, held in Washington, D.C., in June 2024. The gathering brought together 48 founders and leaders of new universities from around the world to share what they were learning about creating new institutions and new approaches to undergraduate education. One of the Summit's sessions explicitly asked what new and established universities could learn from one another.
The Future Universities Alliance formally launched in January 2026. By June, its inaugural Innovation Sandbox had selected 49 institutions from 23 countries for a 12-month peer-learning program focused on ambitious, institution-level innovation. The cohort includes founders creating new universities, administrators and faculty leading major changes within established institutions, and leaders of proven models exploring how their innovations might work in new contexts.
The Sandbox organizes this work around three pathways: building new universities, transforming existing institutions, and scaling proven innovations for broader impact. Participants engage in facilitated peer exchange, guidance, and feedback throughout the year, while working on concrete institutional initiatives. The program culminates in opportunities to share learning across the broader Alliance, including its Global Summit.
Many traditional models of international higher education have positioned established U.S. and European universities as exporters of curricula, expertise, faculty, and institutional practices. Duke is taking a different approach: important innovations can originate across a much wider range of institutions and geographies, and universities at very different stages of development have something to learn from one another.
Newer institutions are particularly interesting in this regard. Duke points to emerging universities experimenting with competency-based curricula, lean organizational models, integrated approaches to learning, global common cores, and challenge-based majors, sometimes at a pace that established institutions struggle to match. At the same time, established universities bring their own experience, resources, and innovations to the network. The Alliance intentionally connects startup, emerging, and established institutions so that learning can move in multiple directions.
The Future Universities Alliance positions Duke as a convener and accelerator of innovation originating in many places. As Alliance founder Noah Pickus put it when the inaugural cohort was announced, higher education is not lacking innovation; what it often lacks are structures that allow innovations to connect, travel, and endure. The core question is no longer, “How can other universities learn from Duke?” It becomes, “How can universities learn from one another, and what infrastructure is required to make promising innovations travel?”
Eruditus: The University Plus a Global Operator
The university-plus-global-operator model asks: How can an institution enter a new country without independently developing all of the capabilities required to operate there?
A third model is developing particularly quickly in India, where Eruditus has moved well beyond the online and in-person executive education business for which it became widely known.
In January 2026, Eruditus announced partnerships with seven foreign universities seeking to establish campuses in India: Illinois Institute of Technology in Mumbai; the universities of Aberdeen, Bristol, and York in Mumbai; the University of Liverpool in Bengaluru; the University of Victoria in the Delhi NCR/Gurugram area; and the University of New South Wales. Eruditus is providing on-the-ground capabilities to support the universities' entry and operation in India.
Most of the campuses are beginning operations during the 2026 academic cycle, with initial programs spanning business, economics, computer science, artificial intelligence, data science, biomedical sciences, accounting and finance, financial technology, game design, information technology, and immersive arts.
Bristol provides a useful example of what the model can become. Its Mumbai Enterprise Campus, scheduled to open in August 2026, is the 150-year-old university's first international campus. Bristol expects up to 250 students in its first year across programs in data science, economics, finance, and immersive arts, with enrollment projected to exceed 2,500 students by year five. The campus is located in Powai, opposite IIT Bombay, and is being designed not simply as a teaching site but as one centered on research, industry engagement, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
This is still international branch-campus development, but the organizational model behind it is changing. Establishing a university in another country requires capabilities far beyond academic program design: regulatory knowledge, real estate, recruitment, marketing, student services, local hiring, technology, employer relationships, and an understanding of a market that may operate very differently from the university's home environment.
A global operator can help provide much of that infrastructure while the university concentrates on academic quality, faculty, research, curriculum, and its institutional identity. It lowers a barrier that has historically constrained international expansion: a university no longer has to build every capability required to enter a new market on its own. The partnership also involves shared investment and operating risk, with Eruditus reportedly taking a 49% stake in each university venture and the university retaining 51%.
India provides unusually fertile ground for testing the model. The UK government reported in 2025 that international education generated more than £32 billion in UK export revenue in 2022, with nearly £1 billion coming from international campuses. The rapid expansion now underway in India could significantly change the balance between bringing students to the university and bringing the university to students.
Innovation Is Becoming Multidirectional
Perhaps the most significant feature of this emerging phase of globalization is that innovation no longer needs to flow primarily from established universities in the United States and Europe to institutions elsewhere. Some of the world’s fastest-growing higher education systems are operating under very different demographic, economic, and technological conditions. They must educate more students, often with fewer resources, while responding rapidly to changing labor markets and new technologies. Those pressures can themselves become powerful sources of innovation.
Duke’s model recognizes this explicitly by connecting emerging and established universities so that ideas can move in multiple directions. The ASU-Cintana Alliance creates a network through which institutions around the world can draw on shared capabilities and experience. And the rapid expansion of international universities in India is creating new opportunities for local and international faculty, researchers, employers, and institutions to develop approaches together.
This also points to a broader understanding of what universities have to share. Beyond students, faculty, research, courses, and degrees lies another valuable asset: the institutional know-how required to build and continually reinvent a university. That includes how to create new programs quickly without sacrificing quality, build effective digital learning at scale, connect curriculum to changing workforce needs, develop faculty and leaders, create entrepreneurial ecosystems, and redesign structures and ways of working as institutional needs change.
Universities around the world are developing answers to these questions, often in very different ways. The opportunity is to create mechanisms that allow those ideas and capabilities to travel, be adapted, and improve as they move from one context to another.
That is why the developments at ASU, Duke, and Eruditus are worth watching. Each is building infrastructure around something higher education has historically struggled to do: scale institutional innovation beyond the boundaries of a single university. If this third phase continues to develop, the most globally influential universities may not simply be those that attract the most international students or establish the most campuses abroad. They may also be those that are best at sharing what they know, learning from innovation wherever it occurs, and helping good ideas travel.
How ALG Can Help
Innovative ideas are plentiful in higher education. Turning them into programs and initiatives that work is much harder. New learning models often require institutions to move beyond existing structures, practices, and assumptions while bringing together faculty, academic leaders, technology, market insight, and organizational capabilities.
Academic Leadership Group helps colleges and universities bring promising ideas to life. As an external partner, we bring experience from across higher education, an outside perspective on emerging models and practices, and the capacity to move an initiative forward when internal teams are already stretched.
Our learning innovation work can help institutions explore and shape new ideas, assess their potential, design new programs and learning models, engage faculty and stakeholders, and build the implementation roadmap and organizational capabilities needed for successful launch.
Whether the opportunity originates on your campus or is inspired by an innovation emerging elsewhere, ALG can help you adapt the idea to your institution and turn possibility into practice.
Have an innovative idea you want to move forward? Let’s have a conversation.
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