A Competitive Analysis of International Students Attraction Practices in Georgia and World Leading Students’ Destination Countries (Benchmark of the Best Cases)

Abstract

Student worldwide mobility has increasingly become an important indicator for the degree of internationalization and reputation of higher education institutions. The universities focus on the attraction of international students as a potential source of financial income and prestige of their educational provisions. Massive global competition between countries regarding attraction of oversea students have been fluctuating during decades. Nowadays the US, UK, Canada, Germany (the top recruiter countries) have been caught up and even overtaken by China, India, Malaysia. The central question of discussion is how the sender countries (China, Turkey) managed to become receivers of international students and what are the main issues small countries, like Georgia, can benchmark from them. Moreover, the US and UK have accumulated the best experiences that might be shared with the rest of the world. As international student mobility has become intensive and economically beneficial for the Georgian higher education institutions the main goal of the study is to examine all those trends and marketing strategies that are popular and rational for the Georgian context. The core aim of the research is to identify gaps in local context and offer further development opportunities for the Georgian universities in terms of increasing international students’ recruitment in Georgia and transforming the small country into the ‘regional educational hub’.