Predatory Transnational Education and the Limits of Regulatory Sovereignty: An Insider Investigation into Offshore Degree Provision in Cameroon

Transnational higher education (THE) has surged in Cameroon, accompanied by a structural pattern of predatory practice. This article reports a three-year nationwide investigation, led by senior officials within the national higher education authority, covering 46 authorised private higher education institutions (PHEIs), 429 delocalised programmes, and 13,611 students. Of the 378 programmes we could verify against foreign registers, 377 (99.7%) do not hold higher education status in their countries of origin. We trace this gap to a single underlying condition: an information asymmetry between foreign operators and Cameroonian regulatory agents, offered here as a conjectural explanatory theory of predatory THE. Six documented mechanisms, notably the systematic “credential mutation” of professional certifications into university degrees, form this theory's empirical typology, an open inventory rather than a closed taxonomy. Against this diagnosis, we develop sovereign integration: the capacity a state builds to make informed choices about which THE operators it authorises, resting on legal clarity, transparency, institutional capacity, and demand-side realignment. We position this framework against existing governance theories, including regulatory capacity, policy sovereignty, and quality assurance. French and American providers dominate the market studied, while UK-linked provision remains marginal, an open question for comparative research rather than an established finding.