International Comparisons

Abstract

International students have never travelled along a single one-way street. The previous chapters have explored their movement to Britain and interpreted this in terms of individual motivation and of politics, ideology and economics. This chapter looks at those who went along other roads, examining how far the same kind of analysis fits the international record and what comparison with its peers or rivals can tell us about the British story. It begins by looking, as in the British chapters, at student numbers and changing patterns of movement, before relating those to the model of student mobility and to some of the tensions inherent within it. It goes on to examine changes since the nineteenth century, looking in particular at policy and practice in France, Germany and Switzerland, which had all become major players by the early twentieth century, and in the United States, the Soviet Union and Australia which joined them as the century went on.