[aksbhat]

Harvard affiliates? There are no Harvard affiliates but there are higher education affiliates, which are called as universities. Harvard itself is one such affiliate in some sense.

Universities are a result of Theory of The Firm, since a university is generally restricted to small geographic region, it can decrease the transaction costs between the various components of higher education. However if you franchise a university across multiple locations, the net transaction costs go up.

E.g. University of California system can be considered as an affiliate system. However you would still find one UC e.g. Berkeley more reputed than other e.g. Santa Barbara.

Peter Thiel incorrectly assumes, that a University system can share a lot of resources between distant geographic locations. However most of the resources such as faculty, labs cannot be shared. Thus you are better off increase capacity of students rather than branching out.

[Duff]

Rapacious universities are testing the theory of creating affiliates in pursuit of more money. NYU, Cornell, Texas A&M, and Carnegie-Mellon are opening up campuses in the UAE to pull in some more money.