Going Overseas for Higher Education: The Asian Experience

Abstract

Over the quarter century from 1950 to 1978 the number of tertiary-level students studying in foreign countries increased from 107,589 to 842,705-nearly eight times.' Between 1968 and 1978, the most recent 10-year period for which data is available, the increase was nearly 250 percent. If a straight-line projection is fitted to past numbers, overseas students will number nearly 21/2 million by the year 2000. From a quantitative standpoint, studying overseas has become important only since World War II. During the early postwar years, the number of overseas students remained constant and was a modest proportion of the total number of students in the world's rapidly expanding higher educational institutions. However, in recent years, while the rate of increase in numbers of overseas students has been high, the rate of increase in numbers of places in the world's higher educational institutions has begun to level off. Thus, since the early 1970s, the number of overseas students as a percentage of all students in the world has increased somewhat: from 2.0 percent in 1968 to 2.3 percent in 1978. Though many observers have commented on the rapid postwar increase in the number of overseas students, few have tried to explain that increase, and no serious attempts have been made to explain the considerable national differences in the numbers of students from other countries in