Once, Brahmandatta, the King of Benares had a son named Prince Brahmandatta. Now kings of former times, though there might be a famous teacher living in their city, often used to send their sons to foreign countries afar off to complete their education, that by this means they might learn to quell their pride and high-mindedness, and endure heat or cold, and be made acquainted with the ways of the world. So did this king. Calling his boy to him (now the lad was sixteen years old), he gave him a pair of sandals, a sunshade of leaves, and a thousand pieces of money with the instruction ‘My son get you to Taksasila and stay there’. (Jataka tales, 4th century BC)
The [Athenian] Academy was a school not only of philosophy but also of political science; it was a seminary that provided councillors and law-givers for republics and reigning sovereigns – Plutarch gives a list of the statesmen Plato helped to produce, and they were to be found in every part of the Hellenic world: Dion of Syracuse, … Aristonymos the law-giver of Megalopolis in Arcadia, Phormion of Elis, Menedemus of Pyrrha, Eudoxus of Cnidus, Aristotle of Stagira, and, lastly, Xenophon, adviser to Alexander. (Henri Marrou 19561)
In the nineteenth century Gandhi crossed oceans to study and returned home to transform India. Rutsherford travelled and stayed in England to transform physics. In the twentieth, Ho Chi Minh studied in Paris and Moscow and Nkrumah in the United States and Britain, both returning home to transform their countries. Watson crossed the Atlantic as a research student before sharing a Nobel Prize for determining the structure of DNA. At least some of their successors in the twenty-first century, numbered in their millions, can be expected to match their achievements. The stories of students who travelled abroad are part of the world’s intellectual history. More than that, their records, and that of their reasons for travelling, are intertwined with the history of the countries and institutions that sent them and received them and widen our more general understanding of the past 150 years.
Our story begins in 1860, a year of intellectual fertility and ferment. The origin of species, published in the previous November, was on the book stalls. Thomas Huxley and Louis Pasteur were transforming the life sciences in Britain and France. To the west, Lincoln was elected president as the United States drifted to civil war. To the east, Russia was enjoying one of its brief spells of openness and reform in which Alexander II removed his predecessor’s restrictions on universities and allowed students to travel abroad. They could even do so on government money, with 100 funded to travel to western Europe over two years. Russian universities were built on a German model and employed German teachers, creating links that took students from Russia to Germany and Switzerland. Among them a small circle of Russian students in Heidelberg included the chemists Alexander Borodin, who was to achieve greater fame as a composer, and Dmitri Mendeleev, who was to formulate the first periodic table six years later, and the physiologist, Ivan Sechenov. He returned to Russia the same year and gained his doctorate at the Medical and Surgical Academy of St Petersburg with a thesis on the enduring topic of the physiology of alcohol addiction. His research interests in the behaviour of nerve cells took him to work at the meeting point of physiology and psychology and to become one of the new men of resurgent Russian science, described by Ivan Pavlov as ‘the father of Russian physiology’.2
Travel to a foreign university was a route to good scholarship and academic advancement for Sechenov. In the same year, in very different settings to the east and the west, two writers were developing their own arguments for study abroad. In China, the Taiping civil war that had been devastating the country was nearing its end, with a re-establishment of the power of the Qing dynasty and a revival of plans to modernise the country, seen as demanding closer contact with the west. Yung Wing, one of America’s first Chinese students and Yale’s first graduate from China, had been back there for six years, working as a businessman, and was pressing for others to follow his path across the Pacific, although it took another 12 years before he could lead a mission of 30 boys to study in the United States.3 Meanwhile an American, William Everett, was at Cambridge and concerned that few of his fellow countrymen were studying in England. He attributed this partly to its cost, partly to the ‘general persuasion that English scholars are inferior to German’ and partly to the shortage of information in America about the English universities. To help put things right he returned home, gave a series of lectures on studying in Cambridge and turned them into one of its early student guides. He combined a warning that the races at Newmarket were ‘indeed a fruitful source of temptation, being only sixteen miles from Cambridge’, with an explanation that mathematics and the classics were all-important. Students were not only travelling to study but making the case for others to follow their example.
Over 150 years hugely increasing numbers of students crossed the world to follow the example of Sechenov, Yung and Everett. They were helped by improved transport, encouraged by university development and change, and they played their part in the intellectual developments that followed the ferments of 1860. As numbers grew, foreign students moved from being a rare exception, numbering perhaps 1500 to 2000 in 1860, to becoming the stuff of big business, amounting to almost four million by 2010. Their stories make it possible to identify the factors that forced, drove or encouraged students to travel abroad. They included not only family hopes and fears, influenced by opportunity and reputation, but also the policies and practices developed by governments, institutions and agencies. The history of the movement of international students, the theme of the following chapters, is of the interplay between personal decisions by families or individuals and institutional or governmental policy and practices. Individual choices and formal policies changed as higher education expanded and the scale, patterns and geography of student movement changed in response.
Before 1914 student movement was predominantly a European phenomenon, across European frontiers, and tending to be from the east and south to the northwest. Borodin, Mendeleev and Sechenov were succeeded by increasing numbers who travelled, with or without government blessing, as the tsarist governments blew hot or more often cold on student travel. Women and Jews went without the blessing, with Zurich a preferred destination. Romanians and Germans, as well as Russians, travelled to France. But travel was not limited to that across European frontiers. Egypt sent students to Britain and France. The Humboldtian university made Germany a magnet, drawing students from north America as well as Europe. The United States sent more students abroad than it received but had begun to recruit from within its region. Empires, and cheaper shipping, drove Indians and Australians to Britain and Filipino students to the United States. Everett’s guide to study in England was followed by one for his Indian compatriots by Samuel Satthianadhan, published in Madras in 1890.4
Numbers rose sharply between 1900 and 1914 as the world economy strengthened and higher education expanded in the industrialised world. After the First World War international student numbers generally stabilised, at a higher level than before 1914. Much of the previous pattern remained, with movement within Europe continuing to be important and imperial ties remaining strong. The United States recruited more students than it sent abroad. Russia left the stage as a host country; the numbers travelling to Germany initially recovered but then fell after 1933.
There were three main changes in the 30 years after 1945. First, the United States became the dominant host country, accepting more foreign students than anywhere else, although they formed a smaller proportion of the total than they did in much of western Europe. Second, the countries of the developing world sent increasing numbers of students to the north, in the interest of their national economic and political development. While movement between industrialised countries continued to grow and remain a major element in international student movement, it was increasingly dominated by this movement from the south to the north, with Asia very much in the forefront. Third, the cold war reshaped policy with eastern and western blocs encouraging movement within their areas of influence and competing for students from the south.
As the Berlin wall fell, the geography and the scale of student movement changed. Travel between east and west became easier, while the number of students travelling north and west from Asia continued to grow. After moderate expansion in the 1990s international student numbers then rose more sharply in the new century. New directions opened up: South Africa regained its role as an African host; in Asia, a new policy of creating educational hubs took foreign students to Malaysia and China, even as they continued themselves to send students abroad. To their south, Australia, which had once held down foreign numbers as a potential threat to the white Australian policy, became a major host country, third in the world rankings by 2010.
Personal and family choices shaped the movement of students across borders and oceans. They were usually from elite families and to return to elite occupations: these were the ones who could afford to pay. Ambition of various kinds played its part. Sechenov and many gifted scholars who followed him used their foreign study as a springboard to scientific advance. Their travel was influenced by the reputation of distant scholars and institutions. Political ambition also played its role so that, from the late nineteenth century, future political leaders were also to be found among foreign students who travelled to universities and military academies in Britain, France, the United States and later the Soviet Union.
Whatever their ambition, international students, like more permanent migrants, were encouraged to study abroad by circumstances that pushed or pulled them. Many were pushed by limits to their opportunities at home and pulled by their perceptions of better or more appealing opportunities abroad. Limits to local opportunities pushed students. They encouraged Chinese students in the late nineteenth century, wanting to westernise their country, towards American universities. In the same period, Jewish and women medical students travelled to Switzerland from both Russia and the United States because they could not get to university at home. Until the early twentieth century, Egypt had no national university on a modern model which led its middle-class parents to send their children to French and British universities. Students were pushed to travel by fear as well as hope, most notably from central Europe in the 1930s and from South Africa in the apartheid era.
The factors pushing students to travel were often reinforced by those pulling them. The quality of German education drew one circle of Russian men to Heidelberg while restrictions on studying within Russia sent a circle of women to Zurich. The Indian students following Satthianadhan’s advice were pushed by limits to their opportunities at home, pulled by better prospects abroad. In the early twentieth century, Nehru travelled to Britain to study with his family’s blessing and money and a shrewd sense of the professional reasons to do so. Under British rule, in order to practise in the higher courts in India, lawyers needed to qualify at the Inns of Court in London, Edinburgh or Dublin. The requirement provided a powerful incentive for aspirant lawyers, or politicians, to see British education as a good family investment.
The strength of the push and pull factors was always affected by class, race and gender. Scholarships helped a fortunate minority but family money was more important. In terms of family and class, Sechenov’s father was an army officer while Everett came from a Boston family prosperous enough to send him to Harvard and across the Atlantic. Perceptions of race affected both the recruitment of foreign students and the quality of their daily lives. At different times and in various jurisdictions, it created barriers and complications for Jewish, African and Asian students, sometimes encouraging them to study abroad, sometimes preventing their doing so. Gender was always at play, sometimes preventing foreign study for women, more often restricting it. The first woman doctor in Europe, the Russian Nadezhda Suslova, studied in Zurich, whose progressive citizens accepted women to their university from the mid-nineteenth century. Women students were already travelling from India to Britain before 1900 and from China to America before 1914. Universities slowly followed Zurich’s example and abandoned restrictions on women students. The legislators of New Zealand forgot to write in a gender restriction for its university in 1870 and others followed their example over the next 80 years. Changes in practice came slowly and foreign women students remained a minority in most statistics until, and in some cases beyond, the end of the twentieth century. Information, whose flows were influenced by status, played its part in encouraging student movement. It helped students to travel to institutions they knew about, either because of an international reputation or because others from their own institution or home town—less often village—had already been there.
Beyond class, race and gender, students were influenced by geography, language and culture. While some students were crossing oceans, for many years most travelled within continents, often across a single border. As they did so, universities teaching in a familiar, or later an international, language were at an advantage. The international as well as imperial languages, English and French, drew students to universities that were using them as languages of instruction. American and Australian universities have appealed to international students, in part, because of the perceived value of education in English. The importance of German as a regional language, as well as the strength of German scholarship, attracted students. The shared culture of its universities sent students round the British empire and later Commonwealth while students, and military officers, from Romania and francophone countries went to France for education and training. In the present century students from central Asia have continued to travel to universities in Russia. Cultural and linguistic ties have outlasted the political structures that created them.
The presence of foreign students, and their demands or expectations, forced institutions and governments to develop practices and policies towards them. Policy decisions were needed where there was a wish either to recruit internationally or to restrict international enrolment. Policies were developed at three levels: by institutions, by governments and by international agencies.
Academic, economic and political priorities influenced college or university policy. They sought good students, could benefit from their fees and could see political reasons for recruiting th...