International students

Definition

“An internationally mobile student is an individual who has physically crossed an international border between two countries with the objective to participate in educational activities in a destination country, where the destination country is different from his or her country of origin.” (UNESCO, 2015)

There are many overlapping definitions of “international students.” Since 2015, UNESCO, OECD and EUROSTAT, the European Union’s statistical office, have agreed upon this definition of “internationally mobile students.”

This definition captures the most important group of international students: those in a foreign country for education purpose (UNESCO, 2015). This definition also focuses on students who are enrolled for a tertiary degree (or higher), therefore the length of stay is typically more than one year, and up to 7 years.

Internationally mobile students are different from two other common definitions of international students, namely “foreign students” and “credit-mobile students.”

• Foreign students - refers to non-citizens who are currently enrolled in higher education degree courses. This definition does not distinguish between students holding non-resident visas and those with permanent resident status. The former usually arrive and stay independently, while the latter usually migrate because their parents moved, making them 1.5-generation immigrants.
   
• Credit-mobile students - refers to “study-abroad” or exchange students, such as those in the EU’s Erasmus programme. These students remain enrolled in their home countries while receiving a small number of credits from foreign institutions (Van Mol and Ekamper, 2016). Due to their fluid enrollment status, most statistics on international students do not include credit-mobile students.

While the agreed-upon definition of internationally mobile students has been used since 2015, data on international students reflect the long-standing differences between the three definitions.

Data sources

UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics (UIS) provides the most comprehensive data to date on international student inbound and outbound flows for more than 100 countries, which could be combined into a bilateral database of international student flows. Countries, by responding to an annual UIS questionnaire, report the number of internationally mobile students they are hosting and information on the students’ countries of origin. Annual data are available from 1999 to 2016.

OECD provides the number of international students from various origins who are enrolled in each OECD country. This data source is available from 1998 to 2012. Between 2003 and 2012, the reported number can be further disaggregated into “non-citizen” students and “non-resident” students. The latter category aligns more closely with UIS’s definition of internationally mobile students.

Project Atlas - While UIS and the OECD rely on reports from destination countries, Project Atlas partners with country-specific data providers to obtain both inbound and outbound flows. The data are available from 2005 to 2016, covering 25 countries. It is important to note that the number reported by Project Atlas includes exchange and study-abroad students, and as such, the number is likely higher than those reported by UIS or OECD.

Prominent destination countries that host a large share of international students, such as the United States, are increasingly better at maintaining data on international students. These data could provide further breakdowns of international students by sex or age. Such data might be requested from relevant statistical agencies. The United States, for instance, maintains the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) database which contains detailed records of international student visas from 2001 to present.

Many studies of international students rely on surveys of potential students to understand their motivations for studying overseas (e.g., Mazzarol and Soutar, 2002), and surveys of current international students to examine their intentions to stay or to leave after graduation (e.g. Han et al., 2015). These surveys typically lack a sampling frame, and therefore could not be treated as representative samples.  

Data strengths & limitations