The global international student population has more than tripled over the last twenty years, according to new figures, with more than half of them studying in Europe and Northern America.

Data published by Unesco show that between 2000 and 2022, the number of internationally mobile students worldwide rose from 2.1 million to almost 6.9 million, despite a brief “slowdown” in 2020 and 2021 amid the Covid pandemic. Of these students, four million were hosted in Europe or North America.

While international students “represent an increasing share of higher education enrolment globally,” Unesco found, with the global average increasing from 2.1 per cent in 2000 to 2.7 per cent in 2022, “large regional disparities persist”.

In Oceania, international students represented 21.1 per cent of the total higher education population in 2022; in other words, one in every five students was from overseas. The lowest proportion of internationally mobile students was found in central and southern Asia, making up 0.4 per cent of total higher education enrolment.

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“In sub-Saharan Africa higher education systems have expanded faster than the number of internationally mobile students being hosted in the region,” Unesco reported, resulting in a decline in the international student proportion from 2.7 per cent in 2000 to 1.8 in 2021.

Globally, there were 264 million students enrolled in higher education in 2023, more than double the 100 million total in 2000. The world’s gross enrolment ratio increased from 19 per cent in 2000 to 43 per cent in 2023 – but this increase “masks large disparities in access to higher education”, Unesco found, from a high of 79 per cent in Europe and North America to a low of 9 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa.

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The number of young people completing higher education programmes also rose: “On average, more than one in four young people completed bachelor’s or master’s degrees in 2023, up from less than 1 in 5 in 2000,” Unesco said. The enrolment rate among refugees increased but remained low, the UN agency said, from less than 1 per cent in 2000 to 7 per cent in 2023.

While women already outnumbered men in higher education by 2010, with 92 million women enrolled compared to 90 million men, the gap had widened by 2023, with 137 million women and 127 men enrolled.

Unesco released the data to coincide with its Intergovernmental Conference on the Global Convention on ����Vlog, currently taking place in Paris. The convention, first adopted in 2019, is as “the first global legal framework ensuring fair, transparent, and non-discriminatory recognition of qualifications”; to date, it has been ratified by 38 states.

emily.dixon@timeshighereducation.com