Negotiating Educational Choices in Uncertain Transnational Space: South Asian Diaspora in the United Arab Emirates

Abstract

Transnational higher education (TNHE) has been characterised as a crude form of market-driven internationalisation, often targeting immobile student populations in countries with high demand for international academic degrees. In response to recent scholarship on the role of higher education internationalisation in facilitating and producing diasporic networks, this study examines its inverse: how TNHE services existing diasporic communities in situ by mobilising institutions across borders rather than student bodies. It specifically examines these dynamics within the United Arab Emirates (UAE), simultaneously host to one of the largest concentrations of TNHE globally and a five million-member diasporic community of long-term, yet impermanent residents from South Asia. Drawing on interviews with South Asian students in undergraduate degree programmes at three British international branch campuses (IBCs), it explores how students perceive their IBCs as strategic sources of valuable degree capitals for enhancing employment opportunities in the UAE and securing against precarity and uncertain futures as perpetually impermanent residents. The research implicates the role of TNHE in diaspora policymaking, asking how IBCs function as an extension of a limited social contract between a diasporic community and its 'host' state.

Transnational education, labor market outcomes and graduate employability: a scoping review

“…Publication type TNE studies have a high prevalence of non-peer-reviewed gray literature, which oftentimes appears in the form of reports of mixed methods research that was commissioned by government agencies seeking to survey the landscape or provide an update on the TNE context of specific countries or regions (e.g. Knight and McNamara, 2017;Ilieva et al, 2021;Rensimer et al, 2021). Academic research on TNE tends to focus on country-specific, contextualized case studies (e.g.…”

“…Arp (2016a, b) investigated why TNE students choose postgraduate studies over entering the workforce and found that students were unprepared for applying for work due to a lack of career services. A recent study on international branch campus graduates in the UAE indicates that career services and preparation events are attended by over 75% of students, and this participation is linked to perceived employability gains (Rensimer et al, 2021). In a study of transnational medical school graduates that included a comparison between the home and host campuses (Ireland and Bahrain, respectively), Kassim et al (2016) found that the institution was capable of providing binational career services but that graduates felt the need for a career office that was specific to the transnational career context.…”

Arabicization or Englishization of higher education in the Arab world? Controversies, policies and realities

“…International branch campuses (IBCs) – operated by international universities for expanding global outreach and student exchange – are now found in some Arab countries. The United Arab Emirates hosts the largest number of IBCs in the Arab world ( Rensimer, 2021 ). It has campuses for international universities such as the University of Birmingham, Heriot-Watt University, the University of South Wales, and the University of Bradford.…”

Circulation and containment in the knowledge-based economy: Transnational education zones in Dubai and Qatar

“…Moreover, offshore campuses function as controlled testbeds for foreign, often Western, forms of education perceived as crucial for a globalised knowledge economy (which scholars have analysed for their complex neo-colonial and imperial implications, see Koch and Vora, 2019). While the more elitist campuses also serve a minority of Arab Gulf citizen students, they mainly offer degree programmes to the large populations of resident migrants to produce a domestic pool of high-skilled labour (Geddie, 2012; Miller-Idriss and Hanauer, 2011; Rensimer, 2021; Stephenson and Rajendram, 2019).…”

“…The latter in particular is an important factor to consider for resident migrants as they live in an insecure and temporary status in the Gulf, and may be forced to leave should they lose employment or the political climate changes. Contrary to the degrees of domestic Emirati or Qatari universities, students believe that the international degrees delivered by offshore campuses provide greater cosmopolitan capital and thus raise not only employment opportunities within their current places of residence but also abroad (Rensimer, 2021). By providing these higher education opportunities to their resident migrant populations, the governments of Qatar and Dubai aim to contain the outflow of potential knowledge workers for international study.…”