When the global financial crisis hit Dubai, many of the Indian expatriate families whose children went to university here sent them back home. But while sons were leaving, daughters were staying, noticed Raymi van der Spek, executive director for administration and strategic development at the University of Wollongong in Dubai.
How better to attract the attention of female prospective students, he thought, than with a young Bollywood actor? Ranbir Kapoor visited Wollongong in November to promote his new film, Rockstar, and hundreds of Indian women—and men—flocked to the university. The event landed on Page 3 of one of the country’s big English-language newspapers, Mr. Van der Spek gloats. “It’s all about promotion, hype, promotion, recognition,” he says. “Everything to get your name out there.”
The down economy looms large for international branch campuses, which now number 200 around the world, mainly in Asia and the Middle East. A handful of optimistic ventures have ended in high-profile closures, and many outposts, both established and fledgling, struggle to succeed. To be solvent requires the steady revenue of tuition, but building a brand and recruiting students are formidable tasks.
Still, college administrators often go in with a “Field of Dreams mentality: If we build it, they’ll come,” says Kevin Kinser, an associate professor of education and co-director of the Cross-Border Education Research Team at the State University of New York at Albany.
Wollongong, a branch of the Australian university in New South Wales, takes nothing for granted. Striving to maintain a strong reputation in the region, the university draws ever more students to its three buildings here in the education theme park of Knowledge Village. Its population of 3,100, evenly split between undergraduate and graduate programs, plus 500 English-language students, comes from 95 countries, and new enrollments in 2011 were up more than a third over the previous year.
Coming to Dubai in 1993 gave Wollongong an early foothold, but it can’t rely on that in a crowded higher-education market, where studies now show that supply exceeds demand.
One of more than 80 universities in this shiny desert metropolis, Wollongong has been agile and aggressive in international recruitment, among other pursuits. Mr. Van der Spek manages marketing meticulously and tracks recruiters’ numbers, rewarding top performers; the Office of Institutional Effectiveness, directed by a sociologist, conducts continuous market research.
Wollongong also invites local high schools to bus over their students, and it takes them to the activities area, usually clacking with Ping-Pong and billiards matches. Franky Barreto, manager of student services and a former player on the Indian national soccer team, knows his role: “We need to make sure that they get entertained.”
Television ads also direct students here, as they watch, for instance, American Idol on India’s Star TV. Glossy color fliers come inside Dubai’s Chinese circulars; Mr. Van der Spek won’t reveal which. Any advantage, he says, must be closely guarded.
Selling a Brand
Wollongong didn’t start life in Dubai with a beach named after it. In 1993 the branch began teaching English in a rented office building, to eight students. It grew slowly, without large grants or loans, investing extra tuition revenue. In 2001, with about 500 degree-seeking and 100 English-language students, the operation moved to a shopping complex on Jumeirah Road, where the strip of sand across the street is still known by old taxi drivers as Wollongong Beach.
Now in Knowledge Village, a special economic zone for international higher education, the University of Wollongong in Dubai offers English-language instruction, 13 bachelor’s degrees, 11 master’s degrees, and two doctorates. It has exemplified what Jason E. Lane, the other director of Albany’s Cross-Border Education Research Team, says is the right approach to branch campuses: “Start small, build your brand, and then expand.”
Local connections help, of course; here such influence is called wasta. Wollongong has endured the shifting, bureaucratic process of seeking and maintaining accreditation in both Dubai and the United Arab Emirates, even when that came to involve both institutional licensure and independent evaluation of each degree program. Through accreditation and other channels, including Emirati alumni, Wollongong has formed strong relationships with several government agencies. When a group of public employees earned master’s degrees in forensic accounting, in 2010, the crown prince of Dubai presented their diplomas.
The university’s branding campaign was in full force by then. Headhunted in Australia for his background in finance, Mr. Van der Spek had come here in 2007 and, invigorated by Dubai, quickly shifted his focus. “This is probably one of the most competitive markets on the planet,” he says.
Mr. Van der Spek, 53, is a fast, intent talker with spiked hair. In perpetual motion one afternoon—checking this number, finding that flier—he finally takes out his lunch, a foil-wrapped sandwich, at 4:30. He proudly endorses a commercial approach to higher education.
“Selling is not a dirty word,” he says. “We have to sell to be able to educate.”
Wollongong’s early opening helped it build name recognition in the UAE, but its brand had become static, and that was a liability, Mr. Van der Spek says. “We kept holding on to the same thing.”
The University of Wollongong in Dubai was too much of a mouthful, he says, so he pushed UOWD. The institution secured the local telephone number 800-UOWD, and across the top of its main building, it mounted 10-foot-high blue letters, visible from the city’s Metro.
In its marketing materials, Wollongong plays up Australia, which is well respected in the region for education, and emphasizes its longevity, a powerful message in a city where universities have closed suddenly, leaving students scrambling. More recently, the campus has started portraying itself as multicultural, to dispel a stereotype that its students are all Indian (actually, about a fifth of them are).
While Wollongong puts up billboards and wraps intercity buses in ads, many branch campuses hardly advertise, says Albany’s Mr. Lane. Top administrators seem to think an international brand will instantly translate locally, he says, but often it doesn’t. Wollongong hasn’t made that assumption: “UOWD has done a great job of branding,” he says. “That’s something American institutions have not been able to do at the same level.”
Strategic marketing is just starting to catch on at international branch campuses, he says. In Dubai, Mr. Van der Spek sees some from Heriot-Watt University, a Scottish outpost, as well as Manipal University and BITS Pilani, both Indian.
Mr. Van der Spek recently consulted with the Knowledge Partnership, an Australian higher-education marketing firm, and he is always scheming to stay ahead. Right now he is trying to shift from promoting the university to selling its individual programs. “Targeted segmented product advertising,” he says, like a quarter-page ad in a conference program on a master’s of engineering management. And scannable QR codes, he says, waving his smartphone, on everything.
No Risks
Many decisions at Wollongong, including new degree programs, have months of research behind them. The relatively few branch campuses that do such analysis, says Mr. Lane, tend to rely on their home institutions or hire outside consultants. Employing a full-time director of institutional effectiveness in Dubai, he says, gives Wollongong better data.
The director, Daniel Kratochvil, a sociologist with a Ph.D. from Columbia University, has been here for three years, in the region for nine. A student of local mores, he just finished a sweeping analysis of demographics and trends in the Emirati education market.
Mr. Kratochvil surveys high-school students on Facebook and job seekers on Bayt.com, a Middle Eastern professional site, collecting information on their backgrounds and considerations for various decisions. What field of study? Which institution? Why? He polls new students, asking which Web banner ads they have seen (Yahoo? Google?) and which radio spots they have heard (104.8 FM?). One of Wollongong’s key selling points, he knows, is that graduates can exchange their Emirati diplomas for Australian ones.
In evaluating possible new programs, he conducts focus groups with students, alumni, and employers. Good decisions let Wollongong snag students like Ahmad Popal, an Afghan expat. Mr. Popal is in his third year of an undergraduate program in digital security. “This is the only university offering this major in the UAE,” he says.
Wollongong’s research recently identified another need: a part-time, evening bachelor’s program. Many prospective students, whether expatriates or Emiratis, don’t want to stop working, the university found. They may have gone from high school to a government job but need a degree to advance. So the university started a part-time bachelor’s of business administration. As with its other programs, tuition isn’t low, but it’s competitive: about $47,200 in total.
Growth can be shaky: The part-time program started in the fall of 2010 with only 28 students and serious scheduling glitches. After a break last spring and summer, it resumed, and last semester 40 students were enrolled in the evening classes.
Wollongong offers no online courses. “We’re in that camp that says you need to have face-to-face instruction,” says Mr. Van der Spek. “There are very strongly held traditional views here,” he says of the UAE. “Traditional ways of doing things are typically viewed as of a higher quality.”
The university’s selection of degrees is also conservative, says Mr. Kratochvil. “Once you’ve gotten away from engineering and business, you have to be careful.” Some branch campuses want to boost enrollment by offering the latest thing, but Wollongong won’t, he says. “If you’re desperate for students, you’re going to take a risk.”
And if enrollment lags, the university may have to close a program. That causes significant reputational damage, Mr. Kratochvil says, because it hurts alumni. It’s better to be deliberate—and patient, he says. “We had a dip, but we rode it out. We didn’t panic, didn’t add anything.”
Wollongong began offering a master’s of engineering management in 2007 and a doctorate of business administration in 2010. It was persuaded by local demand, which is less susceptible to economic fluctuations. A quarter of graduate students at Wollongong are Emirati, compared with 12 percent of the general population.
The university recently conducted “feasibility surveys” to gauge interest in, for example, psychology and culture. It’s not moving on those yet, but as a result of those studies, it found interest in two new master’s degrees, international studies and media and communications, and added them this year. “We won’t start a degree program,” says Mr. Kratochvil, “unless we know there’s room for growth and stability.”
Multilingual Recruitment
For its carefully chosen programs, Wollongong chases students. From 2010 to 2011, it drove up its new enrollments by 39 percent, to 1,360.
Officials here scrutinize their numbers and know whom to keep looking for: expats in Dubai, undergraduates from Pakistan, graduate students from India. Five years ago, international students composed 5 percent of the total population; now they make up 25 percent, a more significant share of a larger number.
UOWD’s recruiters visit fairs and schools across the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa; lately they see a lot of potential in Oman, Kazakhstan, and Morocco. In another growing market, Nigeria, they understand the importance of subtle, focused advertising. In the southern, Christian part of the country, they represent Dubai as a safe, Westernized destination, and in the northern, Muslim region, they play up the city’s Muslim character.
Experiments with technology have sometimes been clumsy, like a live-chat feature on the university’s Web site that didn’t initially filter requests, including lewd ones. Representatives spend more time on Facebook and LinkedIn; the first responders are two full-time staff members and three student employees known as the “call center.”
Many prospective students show up in person, about 50 a day at peak times. When they enter the main building, they step into a busy lobby hung with giant UOWD banners: a South Asian man, an African woman, an Emirati man with an iPad. To the left, a sign tells them—in English, Arabic, Farsi, Russian, and Chinese—to take a ticket and wait to be served. The tickets’ numbers appear on a flat screen, referring bearers to particular windows.
Mohamed Salman, a third-year computer-science major from an Indian family in Abu Dhabi, recalls liking the university’s customer-service approach when he was a bewildered high-school student. “The staff really helped me out a lot and answered all my questions,” he says. “I had lots.”
Wollongong’s recruiters—Mr. Van der Spek calls them the A-Team—are almost all alumni. There’s Abubakar from Nigeria, Ahmad from Pakistan, Ahmed from Sudan, Ekaterina from Russia, Mohammed from the UAE, Shahab from Iran, and Toufik from Algeria. Together they speak 10 languages. As a young man at a window is hesitating in English, Toufik appears, and they begin chatting easily in Arabic.
The recruitment team for Michigan State University’s now defunct campus here consisted of two American women, one of whom spoke a little Arabic. Mr. Van der Spek is now trying to figure out if the Kazakhs are politically comfortable with the Russian woman. He keeps an eye out for university employees of other nationalities. He tapped a Chinese instructor in the English-language program, Cherry Lei, to start recruiting Chinese expats on the side; she would hang around the city’s Dragon Mart. Now he’s after a Turkish-speaking Ukrainian woman who assisted the former vice president for academic affairs.
Ahmed Elsir M.A. Abdelnour, one of the recruitment team’s leaders, describes his work as “results oriented.” Each recruiter has targets and competes for weekly prizes—dinner at a local hotel—in students served, applications collected, and offers made. Objective criteria—high-school or college grade-point averages and English test scores—keep the process honest, says Mr. Abdelnour. At certain levels, students get in; slightly lower, they are admitted conditionally. The university tries to give answers in 48 hours, referring unsuccessful applicants to the English-language program.
Wollongong also offers incentives for current students to recruit. For four years it has run a refer-a-friend program for 10 percent off tuition. Large banners adorn the hallways: “Looking to lower your tuition?” one says. “The more friends you refer, the more discount you get!” says another, describing silver, gold, and platinum levels.
The banners surprised the university’s interim president, David Rome, but he has supported the program. “We have to be innovative,” he says. “We’ve got to move with the times.”
According to Mr. Van der Spek, his commercial attitude hasn’t always gone over well with top administrators. “We’re coming to terms with that slowly,” he says. Last year he fought to separate admissions from the registrar and merge it with the marketing division, to form the recruitment department. “If I had been allowed,” he says, “I would have called it ‘sales.’”
Many branch campuses operate like for-profit companies, say Mr. Kinser and Mr. Lane, the American researchers. Without the benefit of an endowment (or a subsidy from a host country), a branch campus has to stay in the black for its parent institution, which, especially if it’s public, has politics to worry about.
At Wollongong in Dubai, 90 percent of revenue comes from tuition, and the profits go back to Australia. A few years ago, the New South Wales premier called UOWD one of the state’s most successful exports. Success for an international branch campus means quality, sure, but it needs to be financially viable. Otherwise, says Mr. Van der Spek, “there would be questions asked about why we’re here.”
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