Abstract
There is no question that international student mobility has transformed the international higher education landscape in recent decades. It has brought diverse benefits to students, institutions, communities, and countries. At the student level, these include enhanced future employability, personal development, language acquisition, and greater intercultural sensitivity—all seen as advantages in today’s globalized world. For the sending countries, the opportunity for the best and the brightest to study at the world’s great universities holds the promise that they will return with greater expertise and knowledge of diverse languages, cultures, and business methods, thus increasing their countries’ competitive edge in the interconnected world economy. For the host countries and universities, international students have become a fiercely contested source of brain gain as well as income. Such expectations have also been fueled by the explosive growth of foreign students at the tertiary level. According to OECD and UNESCO data, the number of foreign tertiary students enrolled outside their country of citizenship more than quadrupled over the past three decades, increasing from 0.8 million in 1975 to 4.1 million in 2010 (OECD 2012, 362).