This new project, in partnership with the Economist Intelligence Unit, aims to develop predictions on international student demand for education. The predictions will be:

			country specific;
			short- to mid-term.

This project revisits Vision 2020 (a British Council report from 2004 forecasting the global demand for international student places in English speaking destination countries) and builds on its strengths. However, the methodology used differs and so do the outputs.

The executive summary of the project is available:

Forecasting international student mobility - Executive summary (245KB)

The model has been piloted in China and will be rolled out across the UK priority sending countries over the coming year. All macroeconomic market data used in the predictions will be updated frequently.

The forecasting tool has statistical robustness which means that all of the findings can be measured against a degree of statistical confidence.

The tool was introduced at two workshops that took place in May 2008. A presentation given at the workshops about the project is available.

The findings from the first stage of this project were announced at an event at the British Council on 15 May 2008. The findings are currently only available to UK education providers and stakeholders:

Forecasting international student mobility - China report (577KB)

The next stage of this project is to apply the econometric model to forecast student mobility from India and Nigeria.

If you have any queries about this project, please contact the Education Market Intelligence team.