International student migration: a comparison of UK and Indian students’ motivations for studying abroad

ABSTRACT

This paper breaks new ground in its comparative analysis of two international student migration (ISM) streams, one from the Global South to the Global North (India to developed Anglophone countries), and the other within the Global North (UK to North America, Europe and Australia). These two ISM movements reflect different positionalities within the global system of international student movements, and hence necessitate a critical perspective on the assumptions behind such a comparison, which questions the dominance of ‘knowledge’ about ISM that derives from ‘the West’ as a theoretical template. Two methods are employed to collect data: an online questionnaire survey of UK and Indian students who are, or have recently been, studying abroad; and in-depth interviews to UK and Indian international students. Motivations for studying abroad are remarkably similar in the questionnaire results; more subtle differences emerge from the interviews.

KEYWORDS:

• International student migration
• UK students
• Indian students
• North America
• motivations to study abroad

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented by the second author in the session on ‘Rethinking skilled migration 1: international student migration’ at the Annual Conference of the Association of American Geographers in Tampa, 10 April 2014, and by the first author in the session on ‘Transnational education and careers in global knowledge economies’ at the Royal Geographical Society and Institute of British Geographers’ Annual Conference, London, 29 August 2014. Thanks to the session organisers for the invitations and to discussants for helpful remarks. We also acknowledge the key role of Enric Ruiz-Gelices in designing an earlier version of the online questionnaire used in this paper, and the inspired collaboration of Allan Findlay throughout the UK part of the research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. These figures are from the OECD's education database. See OECD (2015, 29–32) for a summary or the OECD ‘education at a glance’ website for more details. Note that the enumeration of international students is far from straightforward, for two main reasons. First there are definition and measurement problems: international students are variously recorded by their ‘foreign’ citizenship or by their country of habitual or prior residence. Second, there is the issue of whether short-term ‘exchange’ students (such as Erasmus or ‘year abroad’ students) are included in the totals: on the whole they are not, but it is not always clear. For further discussion on data sources for ISM, see De Wit (2008).

2. For further details on the interview surveys, access strategies and other logistical aspects of the fieldwork, see Findlay and King (2010, 24–26, 66–67) and Sondhi (2013, 66–82, 250–252).

3. These discriminatory obstacles are prevalent in the Indian public service and in non-IT workplaces. In fact, women make over 30% of the technical labour force within Indian IT firms, compared to only 16% in the UK (Raghuram et al. 2017).

4. This is an aspect of the international student experience that we explore in another paper, especially from a gender perspective (Sondhi and King 2017).