Ana Deumert, Simon Marginson, Chris Nyland, Gaby Ramia, Erlenawati Sawir

Abstract: Between 1995 and 2001, the number of international students studying in OECD nations rose from 1.3 to 1.6 million (OECD 2003), and the cross-border delivery of education, via foreign branch campuses and in distance education modes, also increased significantly. Global demand for international education is fed by the growth in globally mobile work especially in business studies, and information and communications technologies (ICTs) (OECD 2002a), the desire for migration, especially to English language nations (OECD 2002b); and Asian middle classes prepared to invest privately in education (Marginson and McBurnie 2004).

The growth in the supply of international education is fed by national export strategies, for example in the UK and Australia, and by enterprise universities for whom international recruitment into full-fee paying courses has been driven partly by reductions in public funding per student (Marginson and Considine 2000; Marginson 2003). This growth and diversification of student and university mobility is both reflection of and contributor to globalisation, understood here as the widening, deepening and speeding up of world-wide inter-connectedness (Held etal 1999, Castells 2000).

Key words: OECD, education drivers, education export strategies, student mobility, globalisation

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