The student migration transition: an empirical investigation into the nexus between development and international student migration

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between development and outgoing international student mobility (ISM) for the years 2003–2018 using data from UNESCO. Starting from migration transition theory, we expect that development and outgoing migration follows an inverted U-shape due to changes in capabilities and aspirations of populations. As predicted, we find that outgoing ISM also follows this pattern. Probing deeper into this finding, we investigated whether students from countries of different levels of development favor different destination countries, focusing on destination countries’ academic ranking, GDP per capita, and linguistic and colonial ties. We find that these destination country characteristics indeed have different effects for students from origin countries with different stages of development, and that these effects cannot simply be reduced to a dichotomy between developed/developing countries. Together, the findings highlight the nonlinearity of ISM processes. In turn this opens up new avenues of research regarding the diversity of international student populations.