The broadening of international education in the twenty-first century

ABSTRACT

The share of international students studying in traditionally major hosts fell from 63% in 1999 to 40% by 2019, while the shares of other countries grew. What are the primary factors behind the broadening of international education? I extend the small literature on the flow of international students into non-OECD countries by better measuring relative university system quality. This is found to be a driver of international enrollments for non-OECD and non-English-speaking OECD host countries. The results suggest that economic growth and rising university quality are behind the broadening of international education to a wider variety of host countries.

KEYWORDS:

• International education
• student mobility
• high-skilled immigration
• network effects
• higher education policy

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Mauro Lanati for sharing data and Stata code related to this topic, to two anonymous referees for detailed comments, and to seminar participants at the University of Idaho for additional helpful input.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The dataset for this study was compiled from the publicly available sources listed in Table 3 and according to the methods described in Section 4. It is archived in the Harvard Dataverse repository and accessible via: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DJ3ORB

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Notes

1 Center for Strategic and International Studies, China Power Project. https://chinapower.csis.org/data/international-students-china-2011-2016/

2 Statistic calculated from data from the UNESCO Institute of Statistics. Aggregate data from China was unavailable for the period, and from Germany incomplete, so these major hosts were excluded from this comparison.

3 In the global top-100 and top-500 rankings, by Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) of Jiao Tong University of Shanghai, China. https://www.shanghairanking.com/

4 The mean of students per country pair and year is 622.1, with a standard deviation of 4,631.7. The variable ranges from 0 to 340,222 and is zero-valued in 14.7% of the observations.

5 Known from the source referenced in footnote 1.

6 In the 2019 ‘Academic Ranking of World Universities’ (by Jiao Tong U., Shanghai), 27 of the world’s top 30 universities were in either the United States or United Kingdom. This is little changed from the 2005 ranking, with 26 of 30.