International study stayed strong during Covid, says OECD report

Travel restrictions caused by the coronavirus pandemic did not stem international student mobility, according to the “surprising” findings of a new report.

This was despite the “significant” fall in international student numbers to Australia and New Zealand, which an expert said might have benefited the UK as a result.

The annual Education at a Glance report, published by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), said most of the 38 OECD member countries closed their national borders during the pandemic in an effort to contain the spread of the virus.

“A lot of people, me included, expected to see relatively strong declines in the number of international students, but that is something that we do not see,” Abel Schumann, lead author of the report and senior programme manager at the OECD, told Times Higher Education.

“I found that surprising. I and many other people would have expected to find a clear drop in international students.”

The total share of mobile students across the OECD rose from 18.7 per cent in 2019 to 20.1 per cent in 2021.

However, the report noted that the Covid-19 pandemic had a very uneven impact across the group – with the share of mobile students increasing by more than two percentage points in Latvia and Slovenia.

“In higher education there was a very strong shift to remote learning, so that contributed and made it easier to follow part of the course programme from abroad,” said Mr Schumann.

“Maybe in the end people were simply not put off moving abroad by the pandemic.”

He added that if the share of international students did not decline during the peak pandemic year of 2021, it would be very surprising if it had declined since.

At the other end of the scale, Australia and New Zealand – which Mr Schumann said implemented “very strict travel restrictions” – saw their share of mobile students fall by six and nine percentage points respectively.

Mr Schumann said it was possible that these large declines were actually of benefit to the UK – which, despite its high tuition fees, remained an “extremely popular destination”.

With 601,000 international students in 2021, the UK is second in terms of popularity only to the United States.

“We saw the share of international students in those two countries really drop, and it’s possible that some students who went to Australia or New Zealand were looking to find a place in another English-speaking country and decided to go to the UK,” Mr Schumann said.

The report found that 57 per cent of all mobile students across the OECD and its partner countries in 2021 were from Asia – the largest group of all.

At 60 per cent, the UK attracts a much higher share of students from Asia than its average European rival (27 per cent).

Mr Schumann said this could partly have been due to the country’s close connections with members of the Commonwealth, through which it welcomed a much higher share of Indian students than other European nations.

patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com