The global student market

In 2006, 2.9 million tertiary students enrolled outside their countries of citizenship, almost five times the 0.6 million in 1975. Since 2000 foreign tertiary students have increased at 7.5 per cent per annum, twice the rate of increase of tertiary students as a whole. Tertiary campuses are ‘more cosmopolitan thereby intensifying the intercultural aspect of internationalisation at home in host countries’, says the OECD, though the effects are uneven across the world. Australia has seen very rapid growth of international students coupled with modest growth in local students, an extreme version of the overall pattern. The degree of intercultural education is less clear.