Since the September 11 attacks, tighter U.S. visa requirements have taken a heavy toll on the recruitment of foreign students to top American universities. The 2003–04 academic year saw the first drop in the number of foreign students on U.S. campuses in more than 30 years. Graduate schools have been particularly hard hit, with three consecutive years of declining foreign enrollment. But if foreigners can’t come to the campus, why not bring the campus to foreigners?

In the fall of 2004, Carnegie Mellon University—which has the highest proportion of foreign graduate students of any American university—opened an undergraduate campus in Qatar. Lisa Krieg, director of the university’s Office of International Education, says that “time will tell” if Middle Eastern students choose to attend an American university in the Middle East rather than a school in another Western country, such as Britain or Australia. But other U.S. schools are opening in the region: Cornell and Texas A&M also have satellite campuses in the Qatari sheikdom.

U.S. universities aren’t setting up shop only in the Middle East. They are also moving to China in an attempt to offset the dramatic decline in Chinese applications to U.S. graduate programs. The current academic year, for example, has seen a 45 percent drop in applications from the People’s Republic. So, in 2003, Oklahoma City University opened up a degree-granting campus in Beijing. Meanwhile, Arizona State is partnering with the Chinese government to set up an MBA program in Shanghai. Madeleine Green, vice president of the American Council on Education, thinks that private U.S. institutions will increasingly experiment with overseas partnerships in an attempt to attract the best students. ...