The changing patterns of international student mobility: a network perspective

Several studies have shown that international student mobility is uneven; they emphasise the importance of Western developed countries as destinations and reinforce the stereotype of the stability of international student mobility patterns. Considering different theoretical frameworks, this study argues that economic and higher education development in emerging countries and changes in economic ties and political connections between countries have led to new international student mobility patterns. To verify this, social network analysis was applied to explore the evolution of the international student mobility network’s structure from 2001 to 2015. The results show that international student mobility has not been limited to a few Western developed countries, as commonly thought. We found that clustering coefficient of the international student mobility network continuously declined over the study period, and its community differentiation was very significant, indicating that regionalisation became more significant. In fact, the dominance of typical destination countries declined, and some regional hubs emerged rapidly.