Mobility and migratory trends in international doctoral candidates

Conclusions: - Mobility trends for international doctoral students remain relatively stable from South to North and East to West. - The strongest receiver of international students is currently the United States with internationalized doctoral students everywhere being mostly enrolled in the STEM field. - There is a general increase of foreign enrollments in Asia and Oceania, which can be attributed to these countries’ investments in their educational infrastructure, their facilitated migration policies for academic recruits and the high quality of research produced. - High outbound mobility ratios are not necessarily negative, and some countries have made the most of it by limiting their home expenditures and recuperating their intellectual elite after training abroad (ex: Malaysia, Saudi Arabia). - Mobility can be both advantageous as it permits the diversification and capacity building of a nation’s intellectual demographic as it can be disadvantageous by reproducing certain inequality patterns across the world. Recommendations: - A general mobility index for international students (distinguished in terms of graduate level) which would standardize data worldwide. - We encourage a pragmatic conversation around the non-return trajectories of many mobile graduate students in developing regions. Funding or mandatory returns are insufficient solutions and should be discussed alongside career opportunities, political stability and valorization of academia. - We also encourage the valorization of outbound mobility to some degree, especially in countries with a stronger inbound mobility ratio, to both establish balance worldwide, but also to diversify their doctoral candidates’ field of expertise, abilities and create stronger scientific networks.