No plans for Penn to go global

As many selective universities have announced plans to open satellite campuses in Middle Eastern countries, Penn remains committed to its current approach, emphasizing partnerships rather than degree programs.

Though colleges such as Cornell and New York University have set up campuses abroad, Penn does not plan on opening an outpost campus.

American higher education has been increasingly in demand over the past several years, as international students have flocked to prestigious U.S. campuses to earn degrees, said Tony Pals, spokesman for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.

Now, the wealthy Gulf states have become "a market that's ripe for American higher education. . [These governments] are very supportive of investing in higher education for their citizens," he added.

At one Qatari satellite campus alone, Cornell operates a medical program, Carnegie Mellon offers business and computer science, Texas A&M; has an engineering program and Virginia Commonwealth has a fine-arts degree. Soon Northwestern will open a journalism program.

Despite this trend, Penn has no plans to jump on the bandwagon any time soon.

While the University has "considered" exporting education overseas, Penn President Amy Gutmann said the University is not ready to open a degree-offering program on a satellite campus.

Should Penn ever seriously consider a degree-granting outpost campus, it would only be because the school found such a program in line with its mission and consistent with its educational standards, Gutmann said.

She said the University's ability to recruit faculty overseas was not up to par, but added that partnerships with universities on other continents have been successful.

One of these partnerships is Wharton's alliance with INSEAD, an international business school with campuses in Singapore and France.

When Wharton first formed the INSEAD Alliance in 2001, the school had several exchange relationships with international business schools, but then decided a "more extensive relationship with one school" was the next step in internationalization, John Kimberly, the executive director of the Wharton/INSEAD Alliance, said.

Currently "there's a strategic priority to expand our global footprint," Kimberly said. And while Wharton is renewing its partnership with INSEAD through 2012 tomorrow, other ways of expanding the school globally are "under consideration, but nothing has been decided yet," Kimberly said.

And although Pals expects the number of outposts to proliferate as the market expands, Yale recently scrapped its plans to participate in an arts institute in Abu Dhabi based on concerns similar to those that Gutmann expressed.

According to the Yale Daily News, university officials dropped out of talks with the local government because they did not want to grant a Yale degree at the satellite campus.

"We don't want to offer degrees unless we can essentially staff the courses with a faculty that is of the same quality and distinction as the one here in New Haven," Yale president Richard Levin told the News.

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