Can economic factors explain the pattern of cross-border student flows?

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore the factors that encourage foreign students to undertake higher education in 
26 OECD countries over a seven year period. The empirical results suggest that the relationship between 
previous year’s proportion of foreign students and current year’s proportion of foreign students in a country is 
positive and significant. This persistence result is as expected, considering multi-year programmes, low drop-out 
rates of students and lowering of information costs. The growth rate in domestic higher education students also 
appears to have a positive and significant impact on the proportion of foreign students in a country. Again, this 
result is consistent with our expectations, because a higher growth rate of students in a country implies additional 
capacity in educational institutions of that country to accept foreign students; therefore more students are likely to 
choose that country for study purposes. With the exception of these findings, no other significant relationship was 
found in the model.