Harvard, Beijing Call It Quits
Cambridge, Mass. (May 7, 2017)—
Harvard — America's oldest and the world's
richest university — announced today it would close
its Beijing campus, less than 10 years after opening the
$1.2 billion state-of-the-art facility. A spokesperson for
the university attributed the decision to disappointing
enrollment, an inability to maintain academic standards and
mounting financial problems.
The new campus was opened with great fanfare and high
hopes at a time when it was thought all great universities
should "globalize" their operations with overseas
campuses.
With China's large population hungry for education and
its emerging middle class the size of the entire United
States population, Harvard officials were certain their
planned expansion would reap sizable rewards for what is
perhaps the world's most famous university. When the campus
opened in 2007, a question often being posed in academia
went something like this: "With American companies like
Microsoft establishing very successful research centers in
China, and more joining every day, why not Harvard
Beijing?"
Why not, indeed?
The reputation of an august university is based, in no
small measure, on the reputation of its individual faculty
members. When considering the new Harvard Beijing campus,
native Chinese students naturally expected to be taught by
the famous names among the Harvard faculty ranks. While
some leading Cambridge-based professors were willing to
travel to Beijing for a few weeks a year, getting them to
relocate permanently and work full time in a foreign
country proved to be much more challenging.
Many senior faculty had no interest in moving from the
start. Even those who were enthusiastic about the
possibility found difficulties with changing schools for
their children, finding appropriate jobs for their spouses
and moving away from parents or grandchildren. And for
scientists, leaving their graduate students, colleagues and
laboratories were non-starters; the loss of productivity
could not be mitigated by any other factors —
including even the much higher salaries the university
eventually offered to pay. In the end, fewer than a
half-dozen faculty chose to move, and these were
exclusively in the junior ranks.
What was perhaps more surprising was that the
Admissions Office received only about one-tenth of the
undergraduate applications it had expected. When polling
prospective students, the staff heard, "Part of the reason
to go to Harvard is to experience Harvard Yard, Harvard
Square and Cambridge, to be among the ivy-covered buildings
and to experience the ambience of a unique cultural
environment. If I were to stay in China, I could go to
Beijing University — the "Harvard of China" —
for a lot less money. And besides, the faculty you have
hired aren't really Harvard faculty."
Many prospects from China also noted they wanted to go
to a school with an established alumni network, like
Beijing University.
Harvard would have been willing to stay the course,
but it found that running a second campus in Beijing was
much more expensive than originally anticipated. Even with
an enormous endowment, education at Harvard — or at
any other research university — is a money-losing
proposition, and without wealthy donors who wished to
support the Beijing campus to the tune of hundreds of
millions of dollars, the endeavor just was not sustainable.
Unable to make a go of it, Harvard announced that it would
sell its new facility to the University of Phoenix for an
undisclosed sum.
OK, so by now you have probably guessed that this is
some sort of late April Fool's joke. Harvard has not opened
a campus in Beijing. But many other universities —
Johns Hopkins among them — have opened or are
contemplating opening undergraduate, graduate or
professional programs in Asia and the Middle East. Is the
globalization of higher education becoming a reality?
Perhaps.
But consider what happens when the Swedish company
IKEA opens a store in Beijing, as it has quite successfully
done. First of all, local shoppers do not care who actually
makes the IKEA furniture they buy (it might, in fact, be
made in China — or in Europe or Malaysia, for that
matter). They care only that it is essentially the same
quality as that which IKEA markets in other countries, with
some modification for local tastes and needs. IKEA may have
to move a store manager or two from elsewhere to operate
the store, but it largely hires local talent to staff the
stores efficiently and effectively.
IKEA opens stores in China because it reasonably
believes it can make a profit and recoup its investment in
infrastructure. Not so with education, which, except for
certain very specialized types of professional education
like executive management courses, has negative margins and
requires a subsidy, either from government or private
philanthropy or, often, both.
Despite efforts to create cost-efficient,
cookie-cutter education by the University of Phoenix and a
few others, higher education remains hand tooled and
intensely personal in its delivery. To date, no one has yet
figured out a suitable alternative delivery method. Johns
Hopkins operates a number of distance education programs,
including a master's degree in public health, but even that
program requires that 20 percent of credits be earned on
our campuses in a personal, face-to-face format. We also
have graduate programs in international relations in
Bologna, Italy, and Nanjing, China. The latter program is
partnered with the University of Nanjing, without which it
would not be able to function. In its early years it
received significant support from the U.S. government;
today that support has been replaced by private
philanthropy. Yet despite the great success of both
programs, they remain a challenge to sustain financially.
Research, of course, has been global for many years
now. It requires world-class expertise in which teams of
researchers from around the world collaborate on important
scientific problems. But education remains the province of
individual faculty members. The best of them, like at
Harvard and Johns Hopkins, deliver a highly sought-after
product that has essentially retained the same method of
delivery for more than 100 years. Economic factors may one
day change this delivery mechanism. But for the near term,
don't look for a Harvard Square next to Tiananmen Square
anytime soon.
William R. Brody is president
of The Johns Hopkins University.
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