Migration of higher education students from the North Africa Region to the United Kingdom
Samia S. O. M. Nour
#2020-016
This paper uses both the descriptive and comparative approaches to
provide an overview of migration of higher education students from North
Africa to the United Kingdom (UK). We fill the gap in the African
literature and present a more comprehensive and recent analysis of
migration of higher education students from the North Africa region to
the UK using UNESCO recent secondary data on international students
mobility in tertiary education. We provide an interesting comparative
analysis of migration of higher education students from the North Africa
region to the UK. A novel element in our analysis is that we examine
migration of higher education students from the North Africa region to
the UK from both national and regional perspectives; mainly we discuss
migration of higher education students for each individual country in
the North Africa region (Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan and
Tunisia) and then discuss the total for the entire North Africa region.
Therefore, we provide an extremely valuable contribution to the
increasing debate in the international literature concerning the
increasing interaction between migration and increasing
internationalisation of higher education. Our findings support the first
hypothesis that from a national perspective, the pattern and size of
migration of higher education students from the North Africa region to
the UK increased substantially over the period (2000-2017/2018) but the
distribution showed considerable variation across North African
countries. Our results corroborate the second hypothesis that the
increasing trend of migration of higher education students from the
North Africa region to the UK is caused by several push-pull factors
(e.g. economic, social, political, cultural and educational). Our
results support the third hypothesis that migrations of higher education
students from North Africa to the UK lead to mixed positive and negative
impacts (e.g. transfer of knowledge, brain gain and skill acquisition
for returned migrant students, but weak capacity to retain talents and
brain drain for non-returned migrant students). Our findings corroborate
the fourth hypothesis that skills of migrant higher education students
from the North Africa region can be better mobilised in their countries
of origin by addressing the push-pull factors that determine migration
of skills from the North Africa region.
Keywords: Migration, higher education students, International student
mobility, Internationalisation of higher education, Africa, North Africa
region, the United Kingdom.
JEL classification: J60, J61, I23, I25