Migration of higher education students from the North Africa region
Samia S. O. M. Nour
#2019-010
This paper uses both the descriptive and comparative approaches to
provide overview of migration of higher education students from North
Africa region. We fill the gap in the African literature and present a
more comprehensive and recent analysis of migration of higher education
students from North Africa region 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 North Africa region compared to South Africa. A novel
element in our analysis is that we examine migration of higher education
students from North Africa from both national and regional perspectives;
mainly we discuss migration of higher education students for each
individual country in 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 national perspective, the pattern and size of
migration of higher education students from the North Africa region
increased substantially over the past years 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 is caused by
several push-pull factors (e.g. economic, social, political, cultural
and educational). Our results support the third hypothesis that
migration of higher education students from the North Africa region 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 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.
JEL Classification: J60, J61, I23, I25