Factors Changing the Face of Global Student Mobility

The following is an adaptation of a talk I gave at the Conference of the Americas on International Education (CAEI), sponsored by the Inter-American Organization for Higher Education (IOHE), in San José, Costa Rica last month. My thanks to David Julien and the organizers for the invitation.

There is a lot of armchair quarterbacking when it comes to international student flows. There are some consultants – and some media outlets out there – who think it’s possible to predict these flows, but it’s mostly nonsense. You can and should ignore most of it. Most of it is straight-line projections of the last three years and some bog-awful extrapolation of demographic trends of sendingcountries. This piece from the Times Higher Education on China’s coming demographic collapse and how it will affect universities abroad is one good example.

This argument is fine as far as it goes – there certainly will be a drop-off in youth numbers in the latter half of the 2030s. But youth numbers are only one factor in post-secondary attendance: participation rates matter. And participation rates are only one factor in the level of study abroad: the means to go abroad matter too, as does the desire to go abroad. None of these factors are constant, it’s quite possible they don’t all move in the same direction at the same time, and we simply don’t know how to measure or project many of these factors. 

There are two other reasons why projections based on the demographics of student-sending countries can be misleading. The first is that international study is not a homogenous good. What “students” are looking for in an international education is not consistent and so “demand” is not fungible. Some are looking for an education, sure, but as we saw here in Canada over the past few years, the education is distinctly secondary: many are looking for a pathway to emigration. A legal path, if possible, but even that isn’t always a deal-breaker.  If you assume that international students are an undifferentiated mass, you might questions “now that Canada has lost 70% of its student intake, and where will all these students go if not Canada?”, to which the answer is “nowhere, that market has simply evaporated because nowhere else in the world was prepared to offer what Canada was offering from around 2008 to 2024”. But that doesn’t fit with the demand-driven model of internationalization.

And that’s the second, bigger issue. Most of this kind of analysis just assumes that supply will rise to meet demand, and individual institutions will compete as equals in a global marketplace. Over the past decade in many anglophone countries, and in places like the Netherlands, it sure seemed like this was true. But in the international student surge that occurred in the aftermath of COVID-19, it seems that politics and national governments have reasserted themselves. You can’t assume the market will clear any more. The supply of places is just as key as the demand for places – and the supply of places is very much a political matter.

That’s why, I think, we have to rethink the way we talk about mobility. And there are three areas in particular where we need to focus.

First, demographics. It’s not that demographics don’t matter – they do. But we’ve been looking for them on the sending country side, and they actually matter more on the receiving country side. Specifically, declining student numbers in the receiving country are what matter. Let’s look at the countries that are suddenly hitting record international student numbers year-on-year: Japan, Korea, Spain, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Iran, Bulgaria, and even Belarus. These are all places with stagnant or declining domestic student numbers that are desperate to re-create Canada’s trick of replacing missing domestic students (which became a problem for us in the early 2010s even if that’s no longer an issue) with foreign ones. I have my doubts they can succeed at this for long – many of these countries already report increasing housing costs linked to international student numbers. But good luck to them.

But that only works if other aspects of domestic politics line up as well. And three other factors stand out to me. First, the amount of public funding in the system matters at least somewhat. A well-funded system is less likely to want to bet the farm on international students. The second is public attitudes towards immigration (short-term or otherwise), which can, of course, vary over time for a variety of reasons. Canada, for instance, is generally welcoming to immigrants, but has a problem in that we have a sclerotic political economy that makes adding housing difficult. Japan, of course, has the reverse. For the moment, neither are likely to see a big jump in international student numbers. And the third, of course, is soft power. South Korea has lots of it. Belarus does not. This probably matters for future student flows.

Now, that’s not to say that there are no factors on the supply side that matter. There are, but we need to drastically tone down the emphasis on demographics and focus instead on two factors. The first is the degree of economic opportunities in the home country. For example, India is an exporter of students to a significant extent because Modi’s reputation for economic management is vastly overblown and the Sikh farmers’ children who flooded Canadian colleges over the last few years are fleeing economic pain at home. The second is the perceived value of the international credential being sought, which actually varies quite a bit by country. For example, most European students minded to go abroad probably don’t see a Canadian college credential as particularly enticing because the value in their home country – to which they are likely to return – isn’t very big. But for Indian students – for whom it is still in some cases a step toward permanent residency – it has huge value.   

A final point here is that there are a number of countries trying to get into the international mobility game at a much earlier stage of higher education development than places like Australia and Canada did. Two places in particular stand out to me: namely, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Both of these countries are still trying to catch up with rich-world standards of higher education attainment (KZ is a lot closer to doing so than UZ) and a huge demographic wave stemming from a birth tsunami in the 2000s and 2010s. And part of their strategy for doing that is to continue to send large numbers of students to top universities abroad – an echo of China’s education/economic growth policies of the last 1970s and 1980s. But at the same time, they are trying to make their higher education systems better by getting them into the education mobility game early and forcing them to compete for students. Sure, there’s also a geopolitical element to this – both are trying to hijack students from elsewhere in Asia who, prior to 2022, went to Russia, and in the process increase their countries’ degrees of freedom from that country. But it’s also born of a genuine belief that internationalization forces institutions to up their game. It will be fascinating to see how this experiment plays out.

Anyways, all of this is to say that we probably are in a new era of internationalization. But the driving factor to a large degree is due to developments in receiving countries, not sending ones. I suspect it will be a more interesting era, but also a more volatile one.