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Beyond the Global City
July 29, 2026
International education is shifting from traditional cities toward purpose-built hubs designed for long-term national strategy.
These zones provide shared infrastructure and regulatory ease, allowing Universities to focus on industry and teaching,
Future winners must evolve from mere real estate developments into integrated ecosystems that drive regional economic growth.
For decades, international higher education was a story about cities such as London, Sydney and Singapore. That's changing. Governments aren't waiting for these cities to ‘grow into destinations on their own anymore; they're building purpose-driven hubs from seratch.
Alongside QS's own Best Student City rankings, a growing share of internationalisation is now happening outside that competition altogether — in hubs like Education City, EduCity Iskandar and GIFT City.
Dubai international Academic City (DIAC) makes the point starkly: 27 branch campuses and 28,000 students on a single square mile — a density unthinkable in a traditional university city a generation ago.
The trend holds globally too. C-BERT data puts the number of international branch campuses at nearly 384 across 85 countries in 2026, up 15% from 333 in March 2023, while UNESCO counts more than 6 million students studying outside their home
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That growth is increasingly landing not in established university cities but inside purpose-built zones - Education City in Qatar (home to Georgetown and Camegie Mellon, among others), EduCity Iskandar in Malaysia (Newcastle University Medicine,
Raffles University), Incheon Global Campus in South Korea (George Mason University, University of Utah), and most recently, GIFT City in India, which has already attracted Deakin University and the University of Wollongong,
‘The real question isn’t how many campuses are being built, but why governments and universities increasingly favour infrastructure-first internationalisation over letting it happen on its own.
Professor Christopher Ziguras, Director of the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne in Australia traces the model back to the early 2000s, when international branch campuses began clustering inside new urban development projects.
‘Some are explicitly education-led — like Qatar's Education City ~ while others sit inside broader mixed-use developments, such as RMIT Vietnam in Saigon South. GIFT City represents a third category: a special economic zone offering a more attractive regulatory framework than the national system,
For universities, these ecosystems reduce many of the operational and regulatory barriers associated with establishing an overseas campus, Professor Cedwyn Fernandes, Provost and Director of Middlesex University Dubai, notes that hubs because established regulatory and physical infrastructure allows them to focus
‘That trade-off is wel illustrated inside the hubs themselves. At DIAC, a single building can house five separate institutions side by side. A 2026 University of Bath study, “Student Attitudes to the Physical Environment and Shared Facilities of Purpose-Built Transnational Education Hubs", found that institutions in the UAE and Malaysia typically
share certain facilities and services in purpose-built education hubs.
“This may enable small institutions, and those lacking the finance necessary for institution-specific infrastructure investment, to offer students a relatively high-quality ‘campus experience,” it says.
It defines an education hub as “a planned effort to build a critical mass of local and international actors strategically engaged in education, training, knowledge production and innovation initiatives” ~ a description that captures why institutions accept shared premises in exchange for a faster, lower-risk route into a new market.
However, the motivations driving these developments are rarely uniform. Francisco J. Marmolejo, Higher Education President and Education Advisor at Qatar Foundation, points out that while some hubs are driven by universities “seeking to expand their global presence’, others are initiated by host countries as a “strategic vehicle” for accelerating local access to top-tier education and human capital development.
Professor Dame Heather McGregor, Provost and Vice Principal at Heriot-Watt University Dubai, frames the decision from the institution's side as a more holistic calculation. University expansion choices, she says, are shaped by “strategic alignment, long-term sustainability, academic ambitions and the opportunity to create meaningful impact”. With global demand for international education continuing to climb, she argues, institutions are actively seeking out models, hubs among them, “that support collaboration, innovation and talent development”
No single model suits every institution, Professor McGregor is careful to note, but purpose-built ecosystems are becoming an increasingly central part of how universities plan their global footprint, precisely because they let institutions work alongside governments, industry and other universities on research, knowledge exchange and. ‘economic development simultaneously.
Together, their observations suggest these hubs differ less in physical design than in strategic intent - some are simply infrastructure for international universities; others ‘embed higher education within a country’s broader innovation and talent strategy. That distinction increasingly shapes both government investment and institutional decision making.
Historically, the sector has measured international success through “visible and easy to quantify” metrics such as enrolment counts and MoU tallies, which, according to Marmolejo, say little about the depth of actual engagement.
‘The real opportunity of the hub model les in its capacity to shift the focus from simple recruitment to regional economic integration, At Qatar's Education City, for example, Marmolejo highlights how a formal cross-registration system lets students take courses across eight different international universities, creating a collaborative, multi- institutional ecosystem.
Similarly, Professor Fernandes highlights how Middlesex University Dubai’ proximity to the city’s commercial and technology clusters embeds employer engagement directly into the curriculum through joint industry projects and internships.
Professor McGregor offers a parallel example from Heriot-Watt's experience in Dubai, where the university's position inside the region’s wider innovation ecosystem has translated into applied, cross-sector research beyond classroom theory alone. She points to her university's ties with the Dubai Future Foundation on a subsea robotics, project as evidence of how “universities can work alongside innovation partners to address complex issues such as water resilience”.
The university's sustainability and renewable-energy work - done in partnership with industry on the transition to Net Zero, alongside engagement with organisations in engineering, roboties and emerging technologies - gives students and academics, in her
words, direct “exposure to real-world challenges”.
Yet, Professor Ziguras takes a more incremental view of this transition. While countries like Malaysia, Vietnam and Singapore have successfully embedded international branch ‘campuses into their local economies over the last two decades, he notes that newer players ike India are stil in “the very early stages" of linking international education to
While long-term commitment matters, what ultimately determines success differs. Marmolejo emphasises national strategy, warning that hubs conceived merely as “transactional ventures” to generate revenue face limited long-term prospects. Professor Fernandes points to regulatory certainty, quality assurance and aligning infrastructure with “genuine demand’ from local labour markets. By contrast, Professor
‘Successful hubs, says Professor McGregor, are “built on a shared vision, strong partnerships and a commitment to creating an environment where universities can
“The size of the market willbe a consideration, but even more important will be how much the potential host country is committed to higher education. Factors such as aligning national priorities, investing in infrastructure, access to talent, research ‘opportunities and meaningful connections with industry contribute heavily to the growth of purpose-built hubs,” she tells OS Insights.
‘She points to the UAE’s own long-range planning: government priorities such as the UAE's 2031 vision, which places significant weight on education, have given universities in Dubai “the confidence to invest, grow and make a meaningful contribution to the country's future” — a stability she attributes as much to regulatory consistency as to the physical infrastructure of the hub itself.
Professor Ziguras points to policy risks, noting that restrictive immigration rules frequently “undercut” the growth strategies of hub agencies, Without post-study work rights and visa security for academic staff, hubs struggle to compete with traditional study destinations.
Resilience also depends on how students experience these shared environments. The 2026 University of Bath study says that while students were highly satisfied with hub life,
‘two-thirds would still prefer a tra preference that hubs must work harder to overcome.
For Marmolejo, mult-institutional hubs fail when they act merely as “real estate developments” where universities operate in parallel. True resilience, he argues, requires institutions to view themselves as “collaborators, not competitors” to generate collective
regional impact.
Professor Ziguras remains skeptical of this cooperative ideal, warning that co-located universities often end up in direct competition. An example of landlord-tenant dynamics that can restrict an institution's growth is the University of Southampton’s decision to leave Malaysia's EduCity to build independently — following constraints imposed by the hub’ the hub structure itself than on whether a campus builds “deeper links into the local community”.
Looking ahead, integration, not scale, is likely to be the defining variable of this new ‘geography. Marmolejo expects the next phase of intemationalisation to be judged by human capital development besides raw enrolment. Professor Fernandes points to GIFT City’s tight, sectoral focus on financial services and STEM as a promising, if stil
unproven, example of this targeted approach.
Professor McGregor expects host-government commitment, not market size, to be the. deciding factor in where institutions build next.
Professor Ziguras, however, urges caution regarding the novelty of these models, suggesting that emerging hubs have less to invent than to learn from established ‘ecosystems in Kuala Lumpur, Ho Chi Minh City and Singapore, which succeeded by ‘embedding themselves in, rather than beside, their host cities.
‘The winners won't be the countries with the most hubs, but those that turn them into real ecosystems — not just campuses.
