International Student Mobility

Quick info
Data type	Numeric
Scale	Metric
Value labels	value labels
Technical name	edu_internat_student
Category	Migration
Label	Inbound international students"
Related indicators	edu_internat_stud_percent_enrol_destination; edu_internat_stud_percent_enrol_origin; edu_internat_stud_percent_sent; edu_internat_stud_percent_received

The data source for the student mobility network consists of all independent countries acknowledged as such by the United Nations (UN) at the time of 31st of January 2019, which have a higher education sector in place. We use data on degree mobility and refer to the one provided by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). UNESCO defines transnational students as “[s]tudents who have crossed a national or territorial border for the purposes of education and are now enrolled outside their country of origin” (2010, p. 264). UIS asks countries to submit data annually on the numbers and origins of transnational students enrolled in their tertiary education institutions for at least a year. We use this data for the years 1998-2019. However, there is a large amount of missing data and in many cases, it is hard to distinguish whether a) the number of outgoing students is so small that none have been reported, or b) there actually have not been any incoming students from a particular country, or c) whether the data is simply missing. We assume that if there were a high number of students from country O (country of origin) studying in country D (destination country), the UIS would have at least an approximate figure. We thus decided to replace all missing data with the value of zero, since there was no case in which actually zero international students have been reported.

Bibliographic info

Citation:

Related publications: Vögtle, Eva-Maria; Windzio, Michael, 2020: Looking for freedom? Networks of international student mobility and countries' levels of democratiza, in: The Geographical Journal (186), doi:10.1111/geoj.1232.

Misc

Project manager(s): Windzio, Michael; Besche-Truthe, Fabian; Seitzer, Helen

Data release: 2021.02.08

Revisions: NA (no information available)

Sources

UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS)