The Cross-Border Education Research Team (C-BERT) was created in 2010 by Kevin Kinser and Jason Lane out of the need for scholarly and unbiased data and research about the exporting/importing of higher education. Originally housed at the State University of New York at Albany and now co-located with The Pennsylvania State University, C-BERT collects quantitative and qualitative data on the topic and studies this phenomenon from organizational, sociological, economic, and political perspectives.   As distinct from strictly virtual or online education, C-BERT concentrates on instances of physical cross-border teaching and research activities.  These broad interests inform more specific inquiries into regulation, accountability, quality assurance, institutional legitimacy, patterns of growth, and institutional failures, among other topics.  C-BERT does not promote or represent any institutions, sectors, or national systems engaged in cross-border higher education.  Rather, the mission is to advance understanding of these issues through the discovery, analysis, and dissemination of knowledge. In turn, this research aims to inform institutional development as well as public policy and discussion.

Taken together, C-BERT’s research has informed campus leaders, higher education officials, and government officials with policy portfolios outside of education, higher education or research.  C-BERT has played a central, crucial role in framing questions for, developing data to inform, and undertaking the study of an important development in international higher education.

C-BERT has co-authored with the Observatory for Borderless Higher Education (OBHE) two reports on IBCS: International Branch Campuses: Trends and Developments, 2016 and International Branch Campuses: Success Factors of Mature IBCs, 2017.

The C-BERT team is comprised of visiting scholars, research associates, and doctoral and postdoctoral researchers with varying geographic expertise and linguistic familiarity.