What does crisis leadership look like for international branch campuses under active security constraints?

Welcome! As I write this, we are almost through the first week of ceasefire in the Arab region. It’s difficult to predict whether we’ll be in the second week by the time you receive and read this. The current situation throws up a level of unpredictability that is challenging to comprehend, let alone navigate, and yet, many universities in the region are being asked to do just that.

This week, we ask them how they’re managing. It may come as a surprise to learn that some have used lessons from the pandemic to keep their students on top of updates. Many institutions are also highlighting resilience, predicting a strong comeback once the conflict is over.

While the progress of the conflict is difficult to predict, one broader understanding is that the economic challenges created by it will persist. In our second piece, we explore some of those impacts on international education.

Stay insightful,
Anton John Crace
Editor in Chief, QS Insights Magazine
QS Quacquarelli Symonds

How do universities deal with times of conflict?

The conflict in Iran has put both indirect and direct strains on universities in the region. But learnings from the past are helping them navigate.

By Nick Harland

In brief

• Universities in the Middle East have activated emergency protocols following regional airstrikes, shifting thousands of students to online learning as the sector navigates threats to campus safety.
• Institutions are applying critical lessons from the pandemic, leveraging global "parent campus" expertise in psychology and crisis communication to support students.
• The long-term goal is safeguarding institutional reputation, with leaders banking on regional resilience and a "strong comeback" to maintain international student recruitment once stability is fully restored.

28 February 2026 had been an unassuming Saturday in Dubai. The malls were full of shoppers, the beaches were full of loungers, and the streets were full of traffic. But everything changed after Israel and the United States launched airstrikes on Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and inflicting civilian casualties.

Iran soon retaliated, attacking US allies in the Middle East with airstrikes – including the UAE. It meant that UAE residents received a message that day warning them of a “potential missile threat” and to “seek immediate shelter”. Soon after, Dubai International Airport was hit by Iranian drones.

Suddenly, a place which had earned a reputation as a safe and welcoming destination for people from all over the world was under threat. It meant that the region’s universities had to respond to keep students and staff safe.

But what actually happens within universities at times like these?

The emergency measures enacted

Professor Yusra Mouzughi is the Provost of University of Birmingham Dubai; the first UK Russell Group university to establish a campus in Dubai. Professor Mouzughi says these are "unprecedented times in the region”.

"As a global institution these are things that are always on our radar, but thankfully we've never had to enact any of the emergency response mechanisms that we've always had in place,” she says.

Professor Mouzughi explains how Birmingham Dubai had a range of measures in place pre-conflict, including a risk register, emergency response plan, business continuity plan and communications strategy.

The university’s first response to the conflict was to hold an emergency meeting with response teams across both campuses. Then, they “made sure we knew who was where, and that they were safe”. Dubai is an international place, with 90 percent of the population born overseas, meaning each Birmingham Dubai student will have received differing advice from their home country. Many will have been advised to leave the UAE. Many did.

Even though plenty of students remained in the region, the decision was soon made to move all classes online. It was a decision echoed at other universities in the Middle East.

"In view of the direct threats made to American-affiliated institutions, and numerous other conditions, we decided at the end of March to commit to the availability of online education at AUS for the remainder of the semester,” says Tod A. Laursen, Chancellor of the American University of Sharjah.

He explains the school has been “extending online instruction in one- to two-week increments”, in order to “give our community as much notice as we could of changes of modality if circumstances changed”. By necessity, long-term planning had given way to week-by-week decision making.

New York University Abu Dhabi was another American-affiliated institution forced to close its doors in light of the conflict. "We've continued to act out of an abundance of caution, and our priority in every decision is the safety of our students, faculty and staff,” says Wiley Norvell, the university’s Senior Vice President for University Relations and Public Affairs. Their campus has been closed, classes moved online and any students or staff residing on campus have been relocated.

Learning from the past to deal with the present

Yet these decisions weren’t made in isolation, with the Ministry of Education in the UAE mandating that all learning move online. If a university did want to return to in-person classes, they would have to send an application to the Ministry for approval which must include a detailed safety plan.

It’s just one element of a complicated situation for higher education in the region. Their autonomy has been (somewhat) taken away, forward planning is extremely difficult, and normal campus life has been disrupted.

It certainly has some echoes of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many of the same measures were enacted at schools all over the world. Professor Mouzughi acknowledges that the university has been taking learnings from the pandemic years to apply to the current situation.

“ Whilst we were in operation here in Dubai during COVID, the bigger lessons learned were in the University of Birmingham because it's much larger and has lots more students. And so those lessons learned and the policies that were developed have come in useful now.”

Communication is another pressing challenge for schools in the Middle East. Both what you communicate and how you communicate with students has suddenly become much more important. "What you don't want to do is communicate every day to say nothing,” says Professor Mouzughi. What started out as daily alerts at Birmingham Dubai have since moved to weekly updates. "It's about establishing standards and patterns that give people a sense of stability and continuity."

One unique aspect of higher education in the Middle East is the abundance of foreign campuses. The likes of Carnegie Mellon and Northwestern have a presence in Qatar, NYU and Birmingham are in the UAE, whilst various universities including Arizona State University and IE University are planning branch campuses in Saudi Arabia.

For the ones that are already here, it means they can call upon the support of their parent campus. And that can benefit schools in more ways than might be expected.

For instance, Professor Mouzughi explains how the Dubai campus has called upon the expertise of Birmingham’s psychology department to learn how people respond in times of stress. This collaboration has led to the development of breathing exercises and coping routines that can be passed on to students. And with the sound of planes and drones overhead a near daily occurrence in the region, they’re also helping students cope with heightened responses to outside noise.

A return to normality?

That’s the present situation in the region, but there are signs that the worst may be behind them. A tentative ceasefire was agreed on 8 April, with the region’s universities hoping to return to some form of normality soon. Understandably, that will be a challenge in the short-term. However, Professor Mouzughi says that the region’s response to other serious situations, such as the financial crisis and COVID-19 pandemic, gives her hope for the future.

"The comeback [in the UAE] every time has been so strong and so positive,” she says. “I genuinely don't think it'll be any different on this occasion."

Still, she concedes that the longer this conflict drags on, the harder that comeback will be. Student intake for the next academic year will be particularly affected, but what may be of more concern to universities is longer-term damage to the Middle East’s reputation. As the old saying goes, it takes years to build a reputation – and minutes to ruin it.

But Professor Mouzughi believes that the region's confident, assured response will help protect that hard-earned reputation for safety and security. "Dubai has done an immense job of protecting its citizens, residents and visitors. And I think that's important to recognise."

The conflict has come at a time when more and more Western universities are seriously considering launching a branch campus in the region. Whether this conflict puts paid to those plans remains to be seen, but Professor Mouzughi is hopeful that things will soon return to the way they were before the bombs fell.

“It will bounce back,” she says. “That’s my bet.”

Nick is a freelance copywriter, writer and founder of Big Bang Copy. As a freelancer, he has written content for Specsavers, Numan, Ricoh, Hearst and many more. He specialises in education, healthcare and music, but has written about everything from financial services to luxury travel. In 2021, he founded the copywriting agency Big Bang Copy. He works with a small network of freelancers on bigger copywriting projects such as website rewrites or marketing campaigns.

Is the Middle East crisis pricing out education abroad?

By Michelle Zhu

In brief

• The escalating Middle East conflict is destabilising international education, as surging costs and safety concerns force thousands of students to abandon or redraw their global study plans.
• Families face plummeting currencies and bank closures, while airspace shutdowns leave students stranded and regional hubs like the UAE see a dramatic 43% drop in student interest.
• Universities must offer emergency aid and flexible policies as student mobility shifts toward stable hubs in Europe and Asia to bypass volatility and financial uncertainty.

Unless cost has never been an issue for one's family, the average student's dream of an overseas education has always come with a complex financial calculus: tuition, living expenses and flights home.

The war, which began in late February this year, has rocked these considerations with threats of currency volatility, skyrocketing oil prices and inflation. Students already enrolled abroad are most immediately hit by higher travel costs and, in worse cases, disruptions to the family income that funds their education.

In the UAE – which accounts for nearly a fifth of India's global remittances – the war has reportedly triggered layoffs, salary cuts and unpaid leave across hospitality, travel, events and retail sectors. For families who have built their lives around expatriate work in the Gulf, these pressures translate directly into financial uncertainty for the children studying abroad.

And for those still planning to apply, the barriers appear to be multiplying. This also means the map of where students can afford to go may be redrawn soon as well.

When money can’t move

Families who hold savings in local currency are watching the war accelerate a crisis that was already building. Students who rely on parents back home for tuition and living expenses may be watching those contributions lose value almost overnight.

Most obviously, the Iranian rial, which had already been weakening for months under pre-war sanctions, has now become increasingly impossible to exchange.

But the problem extends far beyond Iran. On March 30, the Indian rupee fell past 95 to the US dollar, its worst fiscal year drop in over a decade. Despite the ceasefire, the rupee remains at historically low levels. That decline has directly raised costs for the tens of thousands of Indian families remitting funds each semester. For a family sending US$40,000 for a year's tuition and living expenses, even a small depreciation adds thousands.

Families who have the funds also face a new challenge remitting them across borders. Several global banks, including Citi and HSBC, have temporarily closed some Gulf branches citing security reviews since the war began. Though both emphasise that online banking remains fully operational, this shift poses a barrier for families in countries with unreliable internet or frozen digital payment systems.

The broader question is how sustained currency volatility and disrupted banking infrastructure will affect financial planning around higher education. Those who budgeted carefully for a multi-year degree may now find themselves unable to predict, let alone control, what their education will ultimately cost.

Some institutions have already begun stepping up to offer support to affected students. The University of Guelph in Canada has offered flexible tuition payment arrangements, waived late fees and provided emergency bursaries for students who were stranded in Iran.

In Australia, the University of Melbourne has made all Iranian citizens automatically eligible for special consideration for coursework during the conflict. And according to an Australian news podcast, Iranian students in the country have also appealed directly to academics for leniency on deadlines and fee waivers.

The International Baccalaureate (IB) has acted as well, extending its coursework submission deadline across 12 Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, Israel, Lebanon and the Gulf states. The organisation is further offering fee-free exam deferrals and full refunds for students who withdraw from the May 2026 session under its Adverse Circumstances policy.

Of scholarships and stranding

Beyond self-funding, students on government-sponsored scholarships from their home countries face an entirely different kind of uncertainty. Even those who secured promises of a scholarship long before the war are finding themselves in precarious positions, as governments and private sponsors alike shift to realign their funding priorities.

The war against Iran was officially estimated to cost over US$11.3 billion in just the first week alone – a figure that Bernie Sanders, on March 18, said had since grown to US$22.8 billion. The US senator reckons that amount could have cancelled US$20,000 in student debt for over a million borrowers, among other uses.

The question becomes whether other government-funded scholarships, particularly those supporting students from countries now diverting budgets to war efforts, will face similar cuts. After all, overseas study programmes become an easy line to trim when a conflict drains national coffers at such an alarming rate.

Consider the Pentagon, which terminated 93 military fellowship programmes in February this year before the war began, citing ideological alignment rather than war costs. It remains unclear whether other government-funded scholarships will face similar cuts as conflict spending rises.

Students across the world also continue to find themselves in transit limbo amid widespread airspace closures and flight disruptions as the war escalated. The list is long: from the more than 80 MBA students from Pune who found themselves stuck in Dubai, to a Queen's University group that was forced to shelter in Doha after their flight abruptly turned around.

A group of about 30 students and staff from the National University of Singapore found themselves briefly stranded in Johannesburg, their return flight from a field studies trip in Kenya via Doha derailed by the airspace closures.

In Iran alone, the Ministry of External Affairs estimated that around 9,000 Indian nationals, including a significant number of students, were in the country when the war began. Many have since been evacuated via gruelling overland routes through Armenia and Azerbaijan, but the episode exposed how quickly the infrastructure of international travel – and by extension, international education – can collapse.

And those who remain face an impossible bind: they can stay and risk both safety and the ability to pay, or they can leave and face an uncertain academic future.

A new map for student mobility?

The Gulf has made clear its aspirations to become a major international education hub, offering accessible alternatives to Western destinations. US and European university branch campuses across areas like Dubai, Doha and Abu Dhabi have since been forced into temporary closures in the wake of the Iran war for the safety of both staff and students alike, with several moving their courses online amid the ongoing aggression between Iran, Israel and the US.

Student sentiment towards the region has become hostile as well. Data from Studyportals shows that interest in studying in Gulf Cooperation Council countries has dropped 43 percent since the pre-conflict peak in late December 2025, and 30 percent compared to the first week of February before the war broke out.

For students from Asia and Africa who had been drawn to Gulf institutions for their quality international degrees and proximity to home, this could mean a painful reassessment of their educational plans.

Some may pivot to mainland Europe, where countries like Germany and France offer strong academic programmes. Others may look to emerging education hubs in Asia such as South Korea, which emerged as a competitive destination even before the war and surpassed 300,000 international students in 2025.

The intensity of the impact of Middle East crisis could take months or years to assess. But it is already clear that the financial ground beneath students and their families has become far less stable in the face of currency swings, bank closures, scholarships that vanish overnight and students rerouting their plans mid-degree.

For students from privileged backgrounds, these shocks may be an inconvenience. But for others – especially those reliant on Gulf remittances, the Iranian rial, or scholarships from conflict-strained national budgets – studying abroad may no longer be an option.

Michelle Zhu is a former correspondent at breaking news desk at The Business Times in Singapore, where she mainly covered corporate announcements including financial earnings, mergers & acquisitions, and board changes. Prior to that, she was part of the editorial team at the Singapore arm of The Edge, a Malaysia-headquartered financial weekly. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in communications and new media from the National University of Singapore.