Asian Universities Court International Students Within the Region - NYTimes.com

By LIZ GOOCH

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Attending a university overseas has long been an aspiration for many Chinese.

“My father said: ‘Why do you want to stay in China? Open your mind, look at the world,’ ” said Bao Qianqian, a 25-year-old woman from the eastern Chinese city of Ningbo.

The predictable choices for her might have been Australia and Britain, countries where her two sisters and thousands of other Chinese students have studied. But Ms. Bao decided on a destination that would keep her closer to home and cost substantially less, while giving her the chance to improve her English and converse with Chinese speakers. She chose Malaysia, where she is a third-year business student at HELP University College.

With the appetite for higher education showing no signs of abating among the growing Asian middle class, some Asian countries are seeking to attract more students like Ms. Bao.

In 2007, more than 2.8 million students were enrolled in institutions of higher education outside their home country, a 53 percent increase from 1999, according to a Unesco report released in July. The United States, Britain and other Western countries continue to draw the most Asian students, but the report showed that Asians were increasingly attending Asian universities.

In East Asia and the Pacific, 42 percent of students who left home remained in their region in 2007, according to the 2009 edition of Unesco’s Global Education Digest.

Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong all want to attract thousands more international students. Malaysia wants 100,000 foreign students by the next academic year, compared with the current 71,000. Singapore hopes to have 150,000 by 2015, up from 97,000 in 2008. Hong Kong has not set specific targets, but recently doubled its quota for nonlocal students in its public universities.

All three are trying to capitalize on being able to offer a university education in English, and for considerably less than what many Western institutions charge, but each has its own selling points.

Singapore, which has only three public universities, has made attracting the involvement of foreign institutions central to its “Global Schoolhouse” policy. Some institutions, like the University of Nevada and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, have established branch campuses in Singapore, and others, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford, offer joint degree programs through local universities.

Toh Wee Khiang, executive director for human capital at the Singapore Economic Development Board, said the government aimed not only to attract and develop talent, but also to retain it. “The war for talent is at the heart of economic growth, and education plays an important part in creating and sustaining talent in Singapore,” he said, adding that another government agency was linking graduating students with Singaporean employers in key growth industries.

Although Malaysia’s schools are not well known internationally, the government liberalized its education sector in the 1990s, allowing the establishment of more private institutions, and the number of schools has since expanded to 20 public universities, 36 private universities and 5 foreign branch campuses.

Morshidi Sirat, director of the National Higher Education Research Institute at the Universiti Sains Malaysia, said that now that more Malaysians of Chinese and Indian ethnicity could enroll in public universities, as a result of the removal in 2004 of a quota system that favored ethnic Malays and indigenous groups, the local enrollments at private institutions had dipped. Those universities have been trying to attract more foreigners to take their place, he said.

Hong Kong may be better positioned to attract international students, with three of its institutions ranked among the world’s top 50 universities in the Times Higher Education rankings for 2008, an annual list from a magazine published in London. Still, in part because of a quota on nonlocal students at public universities, Hong Kong enrolled only about 8,400 nonlocal students in the 2008-09 academic year, more than 90 percent of them from mainland China.

Currently, Malaysia may have an edge among price-conscious students; Mr. Sirat, of the research institute, identified Thailand and Vietnam as future low-cost contenders. Japan has also been admitting large numbers of Chinese and South Korean students, as its domestic enrollments have declined.

“There are more suppliers coming into the industry,” said Chris Nyland, a professor of international business at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, “but there are more and more people in China and India who can afford higher education.”

Despite the best efforts of universities around the region, their success may be influenced by factors beyond their immediate control. Education researchers say that after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the subsequent tightening of United States visa rules, some students began looking for alternatives. Malaysia, a Muslim-majority nation, was among the countries to benefit.