French students studying in China paint fans beside the Gongchen Bridge, the landmark marking the end point of the Grand Canal of China from Beijing to Hangzhou, on June 14. Photo: IC PHOTO

At many leading study destinations in Western countries, the climate for international students is cooling. In the United Kingdom, most are no longer permitted to bring family members. Canada has enforced a cap on study permits, restricted post-graduation work eligibility, and doubled the financial threshold for students to prove self-sufficiency. In the United States, border officials have been empowered to revoke student visas on national-security grounds, and proposed budget cuts would slash funding for exchange programs by 90%.

These measures reflect a deeper shift in attitude: Education is increasingly viewed through a utilitarian lens. The meaning of studying abroad is being reduced to economic calculation, immigration management, or security control, while its social and intellectual value is steadily sidelined.

Hindering knowledge flows

“International students are not simply add-ons to national research systems; they help to drive them,” said Maia Chankseliani, an associate professor of Comparative and International Education at Oxford University. “They expand the intellectual terrain of universities, challenge familiar assumptions and enrich the learning of their domestic peers.”

In a survey by the UK government, 76% of students said that having international classmates helped to broaden their outlook, while 85% said it meant they felt better prepared for a global workplace.

Chankseliani emphasized that the impact of international study extends far beyond credentials. “When students cross borders, they develop a comparative perspective that often reshapes how they understand their own systems and societies. This comparative formation is not incidental. It is central to how people become capable of critical reflection and public contribution—whether through civic awareness, professional ethos, or social action.”

Based on research involving more than 700 interviews with participants from 70 countries, Chankseliani observed that graduates with global experience can reframe debates on social rights and embed inclusive norms—from gender equity to improved accessibility for people with disabilities—into everyday practice. “As one participant put it, international study is about ‘learning to see from other windows.’ Its value lies not only in what students learn, but also in who they become and what they help others to see.”

The positive spillover effects of knowledge flows are likewise evident within host societies. Economists have found that a 10% increase in international graduate-student enrolment at US universities is associated with a 4.5% rise in patent applications and a 6.8% increase in university patent grants—gains not matched by domestic growth. A 2024 study examining US start-ups founded between 1999 and 2020 found that increasing the share of foreign master’s students in a cohort by 10 percentage points produced roughly 0.4 additional start-ups, nearly half of which were co-founded with US-born classmates.

Although international student mobility has rebounded in some countries since the height of the pandemic, recent data suggest growth is slowing and, in some cases, reversing. “In the UK, Canada, and Australia, the number of new international students is now being deliberately curtailed through tighter visa conditions, financial thresholds, and sector-wide caps,” Chankseliani said. “In the US, total international student numbers remain high, but the climate has grown more restrictive, especially for Chinese applicants.”

These policy shifts, she explained, recast international students less as contributors to the global knowledge ecosystem and more as risks to be contained or revenue streams to be managed. “International students are no longer seen simply as learners. They are treated as strategic variables managed for economic gain, political optics, or population targets.”

Chankseliani warned that such restrictions obscure a deeper truth: “International education is not merely a transaction, but a formative process with civic, social, and intellectual consequences. Declining mobility restricts this reflexive capacity. It narrows the educational imagination—not only for those excluded, but also for those within host institutions who lose the everyday presence of difference and exchange.”

Structural inequality in knowledge production

Marton Demeter, a professor of Social Communication at the National University of Public Service in Hungary, who studies global asymmetries in academic knowledge production, explained that “institutions, infrastructures, and evaluation regimes privilege certain geographies and epistemologies over others. The dominance of the Global North is not merely a legacy of colonial intellectual hierarchies, but an actively maintained system, structured by publication logics, visibility metrics, and funding flows.”

He noted that international student mobility has long served as a double-edged sword. “It enables scholars from the Global South to access critical resources, networks, and institutional prestige. On the other hand, it often facilitates a one-way movement of talent, reinforcing epistemic dependency rather than mutual enrichment.”

In scientometric analyses, Demeter found that Global South researchers are often forced to publish disproportionately in Northern outlets, adapting topics, language, and methodologies to fit dominant paradigms. “Mobility alone has not solved this inequity; in some ways, it has even naturalized it,” he said.

With mounting visa restrictions, economic precarity, and political tensions, these channels are partially closing. “The risk is not only individual—though many scholars may lose opportunities—but systemic: The already limited epistemic diversity in global academia could narrow even further. These restrictions impact not just who can study where, but whose knowledge circulates, whose voice is heard, and who participates in shaping the future of science,” Demeter warned.

Chankseliani echoed these concerns: “The global knowledge ecosystem does not collapse. But it begins to harden. It becomes less dialogic, less inclusive in its development, and more susceptible to fragmentation along national, political, or linguistic lines.” She added that the problem is not only reduced access, but diminished mutuality. What mobility enables is not just the circulation of knowledge, but the cultivation of people who learn to think across contexts and to carry that comparative awareness into the systems they inhabit.

Restrictions, she said, risk entrenching inequalities within a landscape already marked by imbalance. Yet the world is no longer defined by a stable center and passive periphery. “China, for instance, is the largest sender of international students and an increasingly influential host. It is also a site of rising epistemic authority,” she noted.

“Mobility has historically enabled people from diverse contexts to gain access to institutional and intellectual resources that were not available at home. In many cases, this has allowed them to act as intermediaries, building new institutions, challenging dominant frameworks, or widening the space of what is considered credible or valuable,” Chankseliani said. “When access to these formative experiences becomes more tightly controlled, whether by wealth, geopolitics, or migration anxiety, what is lost is not only diversity but also the possibility of relational agency.”

She explained that what is lost are the comparative actors: educators, reformers, translators, and critics who carry what they have seen into contexts that are rarely neutral. “These are the people who know how to make global knowledge intelligible locally and contest local orthodoxy with external reference points. That form of presence matters. Its loss is not just a policy failure—it is a failure of imagination about what international education is for.”

Raewyn Connell, Australian sociologist and professor emerita at the University of Sydney, added that in the short run, new restrictions on international students coming to countries such as the US will do little to change global patterns of knowledge production. Research and publication are not immediately dependent on tuition fees in the budgets of Global-North universities. But in the long run, policies that restrict the movement of students, especially from the Global South, will certainly hurt the Global North. These policies reflect short-term thinking, introduced mainly for domestic political reasons, as part of right-wing parties’ attempts to inflame racist fears and antagonisms among the voters, then benefit by offering protection from what is feared. “This approach is likely to contribute to the desire in other parts of the world to escape from cultural dependence on the Global North. It may stimulate practical projects to de-center global research communication.”

Demeter concluded: “Academic inclusivity cannot be reduced to mobility metrics. A truly global system must go beyond moving bodies to transforming epistemic infrastructures. The current global knowledge system is shaped by deep structural imbalances, and achieving genuine inclusion requires reimagining the very rules by which global science operates.”