Daybreak - Inside foreign universities’ desperate attempts to woo indifferent Indians

Episode Date: June 1, 2026

Seventeen foreign universities have set up campuses in India in two years. Most can't fill their seats. And a Rs 1,000 crore scholarship push launched last month is the most visible sign yet that something isn't working.The pitch is this: a western degree without the visa hassle, at Rs 15 to 25 lakh a year, which is roughly what Ashoka and Plaksha charge, but without the research environment or the actual campus. Students who wanted to leave India aren't particularly interested in a single-floor setup in a Gift City corporate building.So why are so many foreign universities suddenly this desperate for Indian students?Tune in to find out.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

In 2024, when Harmit Talwadi got into a Canadian university, he was ready. He had an education loan of 20 lakh rupees and he had already spent 4 lakh rupees for his travel and stay abroad, on tickets, winter clothes and other essentials. But then the plan fell apart. The university lost its eligibility for Canadian work permits. And without the right to work there, the computer science graduate from Amdabad decided that there really was no point in going anymore. His dream of studying at a foreign university was over. Or so, it seemed. Because then, the opportunity landed so close that it might as well

have been in his backyard. Australia's Deakin University had just opened a campus in Gift City, Amdabad. It was offering a Masters in Cybersecurity course. So, instead of flying 12,000 kilometres away for his degree, Dalwadi ended up driving 20 kilometres across town. When he showed up for his first day in July 24, there were 12 students in his class and 42 in the inaugural badge across the university. At the time, Deakin and Australia's University of Willingong were the only two foreign universities with campuses in India. In the two years since then, that number has now gone up to 17. By next month, 14 of them, including including the universities of Bristol and Liverpool will have wrapped up admissions for their first academic session.

These universities are targeting students like Dalwadi. People caught between the desire to study abroad and the inability to actually go, often because of restrictive visa rules. For the universities, it looks like a really lucrative opportunity. So lucrative in fact that Emeritus, a Singaporean education company has already struck revenue-sharing deals to bankroll infrastructure. for seven of them, reporting nearly $400 million in revenue just last year. But these foreign players may be overly optimistic, because even after two years, the foreign universities in Gift City have been unable to fill all the seats in their courses. So, in an attempt to stoke student interest, six of these 17 universities last month

partnered with Eruditis, which is a brand under Emeritus to launch a thousand-crowdruy. scholarship initiative. What these universities now need is luck, so that things can actually go their way. Because the reality for them on the ground here and even back home is kind of complicated. Welcome to daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Rachel Verghese, and every day of the week, my co-host, Nikita Sharma and I will bring you one new story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Monday, the 1st of June.

Let's start with the numbers. In its second year, Deakin had 46 students. Willingong started with 9 and added 90 more in the following year. Considering that the bar for entry is bare minimum because there isn't even an entrance exam, these numbers are really sad. And the reason isn't really that hard to figure out. Indian students that are interested in studying abroad want one of these two things. A degree from a prestigious institution or a weak,

that gets them out of the country. Obviously, these universities don't really offer either option. My colleague, reporter Atal Krishna, spoke to a study abroad consultant who works with some of these universities. They told him that they don't see these universities bringing any cutting-edge programs here, like quantum computing or space tech. Basically, whatever they're offering is just more computer science and business courses, which isn't exactly a rare find in India. What they are offering is lab light courses.

They are cheap to run. There's no labs, no big campuses. Most are actually single floor setups that can be run in corporate buildings. It's essentially a low-risk model. A top 500 brand name is stamped onto a degree, but without the research environment that made it a brand name in the first place. The irony, however, is that the cheap to run doesn't really translate for students. A master's degree here costs about 15 to 25,

lakh rupees a year. At that price, they're basically competing with Indian institutions like Ashoka and Plakshah. So to bridge that gap is exactly why six universities have launched this thousand-crow-ru-ru-ru-rup scholarship initiative last month. Also, universities like Bristol are waiving five-lack rupees a year in fees for undergrads and twice that number for post-grads. Even Victoria University is offering about three-lack rupees off for undergrad courses. You see, all these universities have understood that pulling in enough students to make money will take time. Bristol is starting its Mumbai campus with just 250 students to show that it's focusing on quality instead of volume. This plan will also help it set more reasonable expectations for future batches.

But there's a slight problem. You see, for these universities, time may not be a luxury they have. Stay tuned. The urgency that these universities feel makes more sense. when you look at where most of them are coming from. More than half have campuses in the UK. And the UK university sector is in big trouble right now. Over the past year, the university and college union,

which is one of the largest trade unions in the UK, calculated that British universities have cut more than 15,000 jobs. For example, the University of Southampton launched a major restructuring to cut stuff just months before opening its first India campus. The University of Aberdeen is facing its own struggles. It had a $20 million financial shortfall this year. It lost over 440 employees over the last two years

and has had to announce a recruitment freeze across five schools just this year. The thing is, this crisis actually has its roots in a major policy shift that happened all the way back in 2020. You might have guessed it. Brexit. You see, the UK has two types of universities. Colloquially referred to as selective and recruiting. Selective universities are harder to get into because they are picky about the students they admit.

Recruiting universities, on the other hand, act kind of like degree mills. They offer an easy route for international students to enter the UK. This was the case until Brexit threw a wrench into the system and European student enrollment collapsed, down by nearly 60% in 2023 to 2024 alone. And as admissions kept plummeting and financial pressure mounted, even the selective universities had to pivot to prioritizing volume. So to compensate universities were chasing international students, particularly from South Asia. But the middle-tier universities, like the Aberdeens and the Yorks, were too expensive to be recruiting universities and not prestigious enough to be attracting top students by themselves. And so they missed out on that wave of Indian students.

that peaked in 2022 and 2023. Then, as Western nations started tightening visa rules, the flow slowed even further and left students like Dalwadi hunting for options closer to home. And the campuses in India are partly her response to all of this. A way to tap a market that won't or can't come to them. Sure, in time, as it happens in any industry, some of these institutions will get greater brand visibility

and name recognition than their competitors. and the market will eventually thin out. Or at least that's what Sunit Singh Coucher, the CEO of a study abroad consultancy called Fate Education believes. The ones that have the best chance at this are those that are offering something genuinely different. Like Willingong, for example, which is the only foreign university here with a master's in FinTech.

Prajwal Bharat, a student from Maharashtra, scored really high marks on his cat. He told Atul that he still picked Willingong over IIT or IIA because of the unique degree they were offering. There's also a difference in culture that's attractive to students. Bhalad gave the example of an exam at Wollingong where he was given software and he could use Excel without him needing to mug up the formula. He found that very practical.

What is limiting though is the campus. Like I mentioned earlier, many of these foreign universities are single floor operations in corporate buildings instead of actual campuses. and unfortunately those are unlikely to attract huge crowds. So, until these colleges focus more on offering innovative courses instead of catering to an oversaturated market, they may struggle to reach the scale they need to succeed. And they have to move fast,

because the crumbling finances back home are a real ticking time bomb. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription offers daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Rachel Vargis and edited by Rajiv Sien.