New Delhi: Students’ love for foreign degrees seems to be on upward swing. With every passing year, more students are leaving their homeland to pursue higher studies abroad. The number of these students increased two-and-a-half times between 1975 and 2007, to reach 2.8 million. US, UK, France, Australia, Germany and Japan are the six most sought after nations of higher education. Other popular destinations like Australia, Canada, France, Japan, New Zealand and South Africa are now getting a larger share of mobile students. Also, countries like China, South Korea and New Zealand have emerged as new popular destinations.
As per the sources, China tops the list of highest number of students going abroad for studies (about 421,000 in 2007) followed by India (153,300), Republic of Korea (105,300), Germany (77,500) and Japan (54,500). Apart from that number of female mobile students is increasing at a slightly faster rate, as a result raising their share of the total from 46% to 49%, according to UNESCO’s recent report, ‘Global Education Digest, 2009’. Even with increasing numbers, the proportion of students going abroad for higher education has remained the same since 1999, approximately 2 out of every 100 students.
Among regions, Western Europe witnesses the largest proportion of mobile students, over 41%, followed by North America with 24% and East Asia and Pacific with over 18%. US host the largest proportion of 21% in terms of individual nations. A new trend in the flow of mobile students is the inclination to stay within their regions of origin. For instance, 77% of students going abroad from West European countries stay within that region, while the corresponding figure for North America is 39%.
Mobile students from South and West Asia are reasonably much less likely to stay within their own region - just 1.3%. What seems surprising initially is that this is much lower than even in sub-Saharan Africa, where 23% stay within the region. But it is because most of these students would be concentrated in South Africa, which hosts one out of five mobile students of the region. Mobile students also now have a wider choice of destinations. For instance, before, 71% of mobile Indian students went to the US, 8% to the UK and 7.6% to Australia. Now, the US share of Indian students going abroad is down to 56%. Many more are opting for Australia, Germany, New Zealand and UK.
