Yesterday’s New York Times made it official — front page, Sunday edition, above the fold, color picture — American higher education has gone global. To the Times, it is a veritable “gold rush” as American institutions of nearly every stripe join the parade of universities opening branch campuses (actually outlets is a better descriptor) around the world.

What these universities are after, including the most prestigious among them, is an international strategy that feeds their home campuses, providing them students, revenue and visibility. And indeed, most programs of international education are designed to do just that. Among lesser institutions, this need “to bring the cash home” is transparent. Programs and campuses are established abroad to provide credentials that are fully recognized in the home institution’s country of origin. The students pay less than students attending the home campus, costs of instruction are reduced through the use of local faculty, and the operating margins are sent back to the home institution to help defray the cost of operations there, or to offset revenue losses occasioned by enrollment shortfalls or declining public appropriations, or both. When students on foreign campuses later transfer to the home campus and choose to enroll for their postgraduate course work, the economic benefits to the home institution are further enhanced.

Australian higher education has probably been the most forthright in adopting this model. Shortfalls in public appropriations to universities across that system led to an expectation that upwards of 10 percent of their operating revenues would come from foreign students and/or foreign operations. As a result, Australian higher education has come to dominate the market for international education across much of Asia.

What is important to note about this model of international exchange is that it is more colonial than global, at least as Tom Friedman has defined the term in The Lexus and The Olive Tree and The World is Flat. The surpluses earned from foreign operations and from the recruitment of foreign students are sent home for support of and investment in the home campus. Unlike the modern multinational corporation, which sees itself as a global network of sales and production facilities in which the center is increasingly less important, the university that competes internationally is primarily a spoke and hub distribution system in which the home campus (the hub) remains at the center of the operations connecting its international operations not to one another but to itself.

Bottom line. We need to be careful before congratulating ourselves about our global reach. What higher education is fashioning internationally follows an old model that many of us assumed was no long viable — colonialism.