Tuition Fee, Student Support Policies and International Student Mobility Outcomes: a Comparative Study of OECD Countries

Migration policy concerning international student mobility in host countries is often driven by conflicting goals, including, but not limited to attracting and retaining international students to address skills shortages and 'managing' and 'controlling' migration. This complex migration policy environment involves multiple actors, including states, higher education institutions, and international students themselves. The outcomes of migration policies depend on the interactions between these various actors (see, for instance, Cerna and Chou, ‘Politics of Internationalisation and the Migration-Higher Education Nexus’; Mosneaga, ‘Managing International Student Migration’). This paper examines the role of revenue generation as a consideration for migration policy formulation and outcomes. Theoretically, tuition fee and support policies can be central to motivations of many actors involved: mobility decisions of international students are often influenced by fee and student support policies in host countries; revenue generation is an important consideration in migration policy for both higher education institutions and states (see, for instance, Lundin and Geschwind's 'Exploring Tuition Fees as a Policy Instrument of Internationalisation in a Welfare State – the Case of Sweden'). Empirically, however, significant changes in other important factors affecting migration decisions, such as student retention and visa policies, were decoupled from the growth in student numbers (Sá and Sabzalieva's 'The Politics of the Great Brain Race'). Using a novel dataset of higher education tuition fee and financial aid policies in OECD countries from 1980 to 2020, this paper examines the 'aid' to 'trade' trend in Knight's (2006, p. 360) terms in higher education student support and tuition policy. It then examines the outcomes of changes in these policies, with a focus on the impact of introduction of differentiated tuition fees on internationalisation outcomes in higher education in each country. Linking to the discussion of complex motivations of actors involved in the formulation and implementation of the policy, this paper then examines how growing entanglement of marketised higher education and international students as a source of funding has affected the policy discourse around migration policies and sometimes the migration policies themselves, leading to diverging outcomes depending on the reliance on international students for revenue generation purposes. This paper contributes to the existing literature by providing a comprehensive overview of the approaches to international students in tuition fee and student support policies; and to the debates in the migration literature by examining the impacts of coupling of university funding and migration.