Subject to a favourable legislation allowing foreign investment in higher education, the top-ranked Darden School of Business, University of Virginia may set up a campus in India.

“India lies in a sweet spot in any international investment decisions we make. I would love to open a school in India,” Darden dean Robert F Bruner told PaGaLGuY during an interview here last week.

“But first I want to see how the legislation shapes up. I am very concerned about the cash investment required,” he added. The draft “Foreign Educational Institutions — Regulation of Entry and Operations (Maintenance of Quality and Prevention of Commercialization) Bill 2010” requires foreign educational institutions to deposit a corpus fund of more than Rs 50 crore to set up a campus in India.

He joins a growing list of American schools that have in the last couple of years been sending signals about a possible India campus post- liberalization of the country’s higher education sector.

Mr Bruner however also pointed out the drawbacks of having a fixed campus in emerging countries using an anecdote.

“Last year, our fulltime two-year MBA students were scheduled to spend time in Cairo as part of their ‘Global Business Experiences’ module. But just as we started out, the Jasmine Revolution broke out and crowds started gathering on Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Even as the situation grew more unstable, we quickly shifted the venue of the module to Dubai and Barcelona. By not having physical campuses in these places we were able to be nimble and quickly respond to changing conditions,” he narrated.

Mr Bruner argued that instead of having fixed campuses in international locations, MBA programs could be designed such that the two-year experience is spread across flexibly chosen multiple locations in the world.

Programs such as Duke-Fuqua’s Global Executive Program or Darden’s Global MBA for Executives are delivered at multiple international locations with an aim to teach business across cultures and economies.

“This allows us to be flexible because we can take the class to places that are of greatest at that point of time. For example, in India we may spend more time in Hyderabad or Bangalore than Chennai in one year. Or in China, we might decide to go to Dalian instead of Shanghai,” he explains.

Perhaps because of the instability in emerging economies, he observed, ambitious international schools were establishing themselves at “very very safe places” such as London or Singapore and building permanent facilities there. “Very few of them are making the same kind of investments in rapidly developing economies,” he said.

But Bruner sees India as an attractive place for opening a campus because of the cultural similarities between the US and India. “Both countries have similar private and public values, free speech and democracy. I think that Americans would understand India faster than those from other nationalities. India has seen a dynamic growth in its economy, making it a magnet for people around the world,” he said explaining why he thought that India lay at a sweet spot for educational investment in emerging economies.

According to Bruner, Darden School of Business, which runs a two-year MBA at its campus at Charlottesville, Virginia gets approximately 7 to 8% Indians in its annual applicant pool. The number of Indians in its MBA program though has declined from 41 in 2007 to 24 in 2011, with an all-time-lof of 19 students in the post-recession batch admitted in 2009.