Why Do We (Still) Care about International Student Mobility in the UK?

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Globally, there are 5.6 million students pursuing a degree programme outside of their country of origin in 2018 (OECD, 2020). The flow of these students has been highly uneven, with a handful of Western, Anglophone countries (e.g., the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada) receiving more than 40% of all international students in OECD and partner countries. Moreover, students from Asia — particularly China and India — account for 57% of the total internationally mobile student population (ibid.).

Scholarly discussions have centred around these unequal geographies of international education. As highlighted in extant literature, this has important implications ranging from the reproduction of social advantage across national borders to the legitimisation of Western-centric knowledge hegemony (Brooks & Waters, 2011; Madge et al., 2009; Stein, 2016). In response to this, researchers have increasingly called for shifting our attention to other emerging study destinations away from ‘(largely unmarked) European-American-Australian centres’ (Madge et al., 2015, p. 684).

Is it time to look at ‘new geographies’? It’s certainly an important question to be developed and elaborated further. But do we really know enough about international student mobility in those main destination countries? My…