International universities are opening campuses across India, but as the first wave of openings move beyond regulatory approvals, attention is shifting to whether they can attract students, justify premium fees and deliver the outcomes families expect.
A new report by higher education researcher Rahul Choudaha maps 13 international universities admitting students in India for 2026/27 across 14 campuses, including seven from the UK, five from Australia and one from the US.
Together, they offer 91 programs – 53 undergraduate and 38 postgraduate – with Choudaha’s report estimating annual intake capacity at 2,730 students. Business, analytics, computing, data science and artificial intelligence dominate the offering, with relatively few programs outside business and STEM.
Choudaha, managing director of DrEducation Research and until recently COO at the University of Aberdeen’s India campus, expects actual enrolment to fall considerably below that capacity.
“I expect final enrolment to land at less than half of even that modest number,” he told The PIE News, pointing to a “genuine wait-and-watch approach” among parents seeking evidence on faculty, infrastructure and placements.
“One-year master’s programs will hit their first placement season as early as next year, and the outcomes of that graduating class will shape the admissions cycle for 2027/28,” Choudaha said.
“These campuses have a very short runway to prove they can deliver on the outcomes they’ve promised for a premium fee. Parents will be unforgiving here.”
Those involved in establishing the campuses, however, caution against using the first recruitment cycle as a reliable measure of longer-term student demand.
Ashwin Damera, co-founder and CEO of Emeritus, which supports several international universities with their India operations, described the current recruitment cycle as “year zero”.
He said several universities received regulatory approval only in June or July, by which point many Indian students had already secured offers elsewhere. Liverpool and York, approved earlier, could enrol around 250–300 and 150–200 students respectively, he estimated.
“I think we should look at year two before we make a decision,” Damera said.
Choudaha sees students choosing international campuses in India as a distinct group from those determined to study overseas, where the appeal often extends to employment and migration opportunities.
“I see this as a different segment of students altogether, not a substitute for those who want to study abroad,” he said. “These campuses are really competing with Tier-1 private universities in India, not with their own home campuses or the study-abroad segment.”
Damera reached a similar conclusion, noting that while Indian outbound mobility is heavily postgraduate, 70–80% of enrolment across campuses Emeritus is working with this year is expected to be undergraduate.
“These are mostly people who want to study in India, live in India, work in India, build for India,” he said.
The University of York sees greater overlap with the study-abroad market. Amrita Sadarangani, chief academic services officer at University of York Mumbai, said some prospective students may have considered studying overseas before finding the same international degree at home appealing.
Students would receive “the same quality assurance, research-informed approach to teaching” while maintaining a direct relationship with the university in the UK, she said.
These campuses have a very short runway to prove they can deliver on the outcomes they’ve promised for a premium fee. Parents will be unforgiving here
Rahul Choudaha, DrEducation Research
Choudaha’s report puts average annual tuition at INR 13.3 lakh for undergraduate programs and INR 17.2 lakh for postgraduate programs. First-year undergraduate fees were around 115% higher on average than at a selected group of leading Indian private universities, but about 36% of tuition at their overseas parent campuses.
The figures use published sticker fees and exclude scholarships, while the substantial living and travel costs associated with overseas study are also excluded from the comparison.
“Indian parents and students are highly value-conscious, and they’ll scrutinize every rupee of this investment,” Choudaha said.
Damera takes a more market-led view of the pricing question. “I don’t need to justify the price. The market will determine that,” he said.
“The justification eventually will come from the students and the parents.”
He pointed to the parent university’s degree, alumni network and academic expertise, as well as opportunities at some institutions to spend time at the home campus. At the same time, he acknowledged that “even 10 lakhs a year is expensive in the Indian context”.
The physical university experience has also drawn scrutiny as institutions begin recruiting students into campuses that remain at an early stage of development.
Higher education scholar Philip Altbach, professor emeritus at Boston College, said it was “probably much too early to judge” the future of branch campuses in India, but remained sceptical.
“They are significantly more expensive than the top elite privates – and those privates are real universities with campuses and facilities,” he said.
Damera argued that the initial premises used by new campuses should not be confused with their eventual physical form. “When you have 100 students, 150 students, you don’t need a full-fledged campus,” he said, pointing to Cornell Tech beginning in a Google building before moving to a purpose-built campus.
York likewise does not intend to physically recreate its British campus in India. “We are not trying to reproduce York in Mumbai,” Sadarangani said. “What we are committed to, and what we can achieve, is equivalence of academic standards, the value of the award, and the outcomes it opens up.”
The question of outcomes is already shaping the wider conversation around international branch campuses in India.
Previous reporting from The PIE on Acumen surveys found only 16% of employers were highly familiar with IBCs, while more than 70% said workplace readiness would matter more to hiring than institutional reputation. Just over half of surveyed schools said it remained too early to assess employability outcomes.
“We have to educate more employers,” Damera acknowledged. “They also have questions. Is it the same teaching? Is it the same quality?”
Some early evidence of graduate outcomes is beginning to emerge. Deakin University said in March that 50–60% of its GIFT City students had secured jobs, with the remainder completing internships and work-integrated learning.
For most newer campuses, however, meaningful employment data remains several years away. York expects this to take three or four years, using internship conversion, employer partnerships, progression and retention as earlier indicators of performance.
The concentration of programs in employment-focused subjects reflects some of that pressure. Choudaha expects non-STEM and non-business provision to remain “few and far between” for at least the next five years.
Sadarangani said the focus on business, computing, AI, finance and management at campuses such as York Mumbai reflected student and employer demand, although humanities, social sciences and health could follow where sufficient demand emerged.
Beyond employability, Indian higher education leaders have also questioned what international campuses will ultimately contribute to the country’s wider higher education and research system.
Former NIEPA vice chancellor N V Varghese previously told The PIE that expansion risked taking place on the “transaction side, not the knowledge production side”. UPES chancellor and Plaksha University founding director Ram Sharma has similarly questioned whether India is yet receiving the foreign capital, expertise and faculty expected from the model, warning it could become a “zero sum game”.
Damera said research should become an important measure of whether these campuses eventually mature into broader academic institutions. “Very often branch campuses end up just being teaching, but that’s not the vision that we have for them,” he said.
He said success should ultimately include attracting strong students, developing “serious research” in India and creating deeper links with parent campuses through faculty collaboration, joint research and mobility.
Altbach pointed to the failure rate of branch campuses internationally as a reason for caution, while Choudaha expects some Indian campuses to become leaders, others to require sustained investment and a few to struggle.
“The single biggest determinant of success will be whether these campuses are given the time, identity, and resources to actually build an institution of excellence,” Choudaha said.
“Scale isn’t the starting point – it’s the outcome of getting the fundamentals right first.”
