Description
International higher education mobility has long been considered as both a source and an indicator of a nation’s soft power. The experience of spending a longer period of time, often at a formative life stage, in a foreign country, can have a strong socialising effect on the inwardly mobilise students. The language skills, cultural familiarity and affective ties, as well as the personal connection forged may shape a person’s life path and worldview. Among other beneficiaries, such ties are especially likely to work in the favour of the host country as the country is likely to become more intelligible and sympathetic to foreign citizens, who in turn may behave in ways that turn out to be of service to the host state. This experience can have a significant, ongoing impact as the students are disproportionately likely to go on to occupy leadership positions in the home countries, or even stay in the destination state, thereby contributing to ‘brain gain’. As such, encouraging the inflow of students from overseas can be an effective strategy to aid in the cultivation of the benefits of soft power. Yet, higher education mobility is not only a tool to build attraction abroad, but also a wider indicator of a polity’s soft power standing at a given point in time, as potential students are consumers on a dynamic and growing international marketplace; countries should appeal – across a range of economic, social, political, cultural and other matrices – to would-be buyers of their educational services. Thus, higher education mobility figures offer a highly informative insight into a given nation’s soft power attraction.
