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International students as a national project: how states brand their higher education

by Evelyn Kim, Annette Bamberger and Sazana Jayadeva

From student choice to state strategy

International student mobility is often framed as a story of individual aspiration. Students, it is widely assumed, choose destinations based on rational calculations of what they stand to gain: prestigious degrees, global networks, enhanced career prospects, and immersion in new sociocultural contexts amongst others. This narrative centres students and to a lesser extent institutions, which compete for their patronage. Yet it often obscures the role of the state in shaping where, and how, international education is imagined in the first place (Bamberger & Kim, 2022; Sidhu, 2006).

The recruitment of international students has increasingly become a national project. While established destinations such as the UK have long maintained coordinated campaigns and online platforms to promote their higher education systems, what is particularly noteworthy today is the spread of such initiatives across a wider range of countries. Governments now invest in coordinated branding campaigns, frequently under the moniker “Study in X” websites (such as Study in Hong Kong and Study in Germany), that promote entire higher education systems under the national banner, often accompanied by social media channels such as Facebook and YouTube. These platforms are carefully curated spaces through which states project what they perceive makes their country distinctive and attractive as a study destination.

We argue that this constitutes a form of nation branding: the strategic creation and projection of ‘the nation’ throughhigher education (Kim & Bamberger, 2025; Lomer et al, 2018). These campaigns do not focus solely on academic excellence or global competitiveness. They weave together claims about innovation, economic power, cultural richness, affordability and safety, constructing an integrated narrative in which higher education becomes a gateway to the nation.

The persuasive strategies used in these campaigns vary. Some build credibility through rankings and research metrics, while others appeal to emotion by invoking culture and a sense of belonging. Still others foreground practical considerations such as affordability or post-study employment opportunities. Across these approaches, national higher education branding relies on distinctive “identity markers” to position countries as attractive study destinations Particularly in contexts associated with geopolitical or social tensions, branding efforts may seek to recalibrate external perceptions by foregrounding narratives of excellence and stability, while leaving more contentious political realities out of view.

It is in such contexts that national higher education branding becomes most revealing. As we examine in our recent article, India, Israel and South Korea offer striking examples (Bamberger et al, 2026). These countries embarked on higher education internationalisation at different moments, with Korea taking an early lead in the 2000s, while India and Israel launched major initiatives in the late 2010s. All three have seen notable growth in international student enrolments over the past two decades, even if they still host far fewer students than established Anglo-European destinations. Each is also a relatively young political state with strong ethnonational identities, close ties to diasporic communities, and enduring regional geopolitical tensions. These dynamics shape how the nation is perceived internationally, making higher education branding a particularly strategic tool.

To explore how destinations beyond the established core construct their national higher education brands, we analysed how three government-affiliated websites – Study in Korea, Study in India and Study in Israel – have evolved since their launch, drawing on both archival versions of the websites and their current content. We traced the identity markers these websites create over time: who they claim to be, what they omit, and how they try to persuade prospective international students.

What quickly became clear was that these platforms do far more than market universities. They tell a broader story about the nation itself. Familiar tropes in higher education marketing, such as academic excellence and global competitiveness feature prominently, but so too do promises of cultural experiences, inclusive and vibrant student life, and future career opportunities.

Yet the stories these websites tell are not the same. While several identity markers recur across the campaigns, each country communicates them in strikingly different ways.

Different paths, different priorities

One of the most striking findings from our research is that national higher education brands evolve in markedly different ways. The trajectories of these campaigns reflect shifting national priorities, as well as how each country positions itself within the global higher education landscape.

South Korea’s branding demonstrates the greatest degree of adaptation. Early versions of the Study in Korea platform emphasised the country’s rapid transformation from post-war hardship to global economic success, drawing on emotional and credibility-based appeals. Over time, however, the narrative shifts toward measurable indicators of performance, with global rankings, international assessments such as OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, and employability becoming central to claims of excellence. These comparisons often highlight how neighbouring countries perform, particularly where they rank lower. In this way, regional comparison becomes evidence of South Korea’s educational strength.

More recently, emotional appeals have re-emerged through international student ambassadors and social media storytelling, alongside a stronger emphasis on post-graduation employment opportunities, reflecting mounting concerns about South Korea’s shrinking workforce.

India’s campaign, by contrast, has followed a trajectory of relative continuity, albeit with subtle shifts. The Study in India website consistently foregrounds civilisational heritage, multiculturalism and the country’s long history as a centre of learning, positioning India as both ancient and globally connected. In early versions of the website, it drew on narratives predominantly associated with Hindu civilisational traditions to position India as an enduring source of knowledge and spiritual heritage. These were complemented by claims about the scale and diversity of India’s contemporary higher education system, as well as portrayals of India as a “pocket-friendly” and accessible destination.

However, more recently, signs of change have begun to emerge. There has been a gradual recalibration in emphasis, with a relative de-emphasis of cultural and civilisational narratives in favour of more pragmatic appeals to affordability, accessibility and global competitiveness. While the overall framing remains stable, these shifts suggest an attempt to reposition India more clearly within an increasingly competitive international education market.

Israel represents yet another trajectory. Since its launch in 2017, the Study in Israel website has changed relatively little despite major geopolitical developments, suggesting that national higher education branding may not always be a sustained policy priority. The campaign continues to project a stable narrative centred on innovation, positioning higher education within the country’s reputation as a “Start-Up Nation”. In this framing, higher education is closely associated with research intensity, technological entrepreneurship and strong links to high-tech industries. The campaign also emphasises academic excellence and draws on representations of Israel’s religious and historical heritage, alongside a tourism-oriented student experience. It further constructs distinct appeals to both international students and the Jewish diaspora.

What the branding leaves unsaid

Notably, the campaigns also reveal what is left unsaid. None of the websites explicitly addresses the longstanding geopolitical tensions surrounding these countries, including regional conflicts such as Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan, and the Korean peninsula. Instead, these platforms largely sidestep overt political issues and historical disputes, foregrounding alternative narratives that present the nation as stable and welcoming.

Multiculturalism and openness are frequently emphasised, particularly in the cases of India and Israel, where appeals to tolerance and diversity help construct an image of inclusivity. Safety also emerges as a prominent marker in Israel’s campaign, which provides detailed descriptions of security infrastructure while simultaneously presenting an image of harmonious coexistence that downplays more complex social and political realities.

This selectivity, we posit, is not incidental, but the result of deliberate curation in how the nation is represented to external audiences. What is highlighted, and what is omitted, reflects a broader effort to position the country favourably within international student mobility flows, echoing critiques of national education branding as a selective and performative practice (Stein, 2018).

Seen in this light, national higher education branding becomes more than a strategy for attracting students. It is a state-led project through which countries mobilise particular identity markers and, in doing so, position themselves within an increasingly competitive and multipolar global higher education landscape.

Evelyn Min Ji Kim is Lecturer in Education in Asia at the UCL Institute of Education, where she also serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Global Higher Education. Her research centres on student happiness and well-being policies, the global governance of education policymaking, and the internationalisation of higher education.

Annette Bamberger is Lecturer in Higher Education, UCL Institute of Education and Senior Lecturer and Head of Higher Education Track at Faculty of Education, Bar-Ilan University.

Sazana Jayadeva is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Surrey. She is an Associate Editor of the journal Sociology and co-convenes SRHE’s International Research and Researchers’ Network. She is also affiliated with the GIGA Institute of Asian Studies in Germany as an Associate Researcher. Her research revolves around the broad themes of education, migration, and digital and social media.


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Digital agility: how a Humanities department’s pre-Covid strategy enabled lockdown operations

by Nathan Loewen

This is one of a series of position statements developed following a conference on ‘Building the Post-Pandemic University’, organised on 15 September 2020 by SRHE member Mark Carrigan (Cambridge) and colleagues. The position statements are being posted as blogs by SRHE but can also be found on The Post-Pandemic University’s excellent and ever-expanding website. The author’s statement can be found here.

My department was ready for “2020”. Not because we anticipated a pandemic in 2019. Nor because our courses were all online. A more pertinent reason was the matter of brand identity. ‘Religious Studies’ is not a US high school subject. College applications rarely include religious studies as the planned major. To retain its place in the pre-COVID university, my department started making a shift in the study of religion over a decade ago (see Implicit Religion). Some of the tacit knowledge and skills base required for the post-pandemic university were cultivated in part by sharing the tasks of creating media that point to and from the department website.

Going Public Online

What does it mean for academia to be ‘online’ in the sense of being public? Some sort of stable, unified entity is probably essential for most academics to continue their employment. Solidarity can be found in all sorts of places. Most social theories explain, however, the fragility of allegiances without institutional structures. But if higher education institutions are in crises of enrolment (pre-2020), endowments, much less a pandemic, Quit-Lit might not be the best collective way forward. There’s an opportunity for departments to think about modalities of coalescence. This piece focuses on the practical advantages of a department going public online as a measure towards securing the futures of its academics. “REL,” the term used for the department, adopts claims from theorists like Francois Bayart to purposely fabricate its public identity.

The constituency of a university is not limited to students and their parents. The University of Nebraska English Department isn’t likely alone in the political scrutiny of their website. At REL, there is pointing back and forth between the website and the department’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vimeo, and SoundCloud (as well as projects such as Culture on the Edge and American Examples). Service responsibilities for these platforms are distributed across the department. Elected representatives and the general public can easily find what’s going on in the classroom and faculty research. The University’s shift to ‘limited business operations’ on March 17 was handled in stride partly due to the department’s identity fabrication approach to online platforms and digital tools. While monthly meetings through the summer established a consistent approach to teaching remotely, the stable location to advertise this approach was already in-play.

Publicly pragmatic

The above suggests there are pragmatic advantages to going online in order to go public. While ‘public humanities’ has a 50-year history in the United States, principles discovered there haven’t made it to department websites. Content should be written strategically to develop an audience. Jessie Stommell’s remarks about public humanities may be applied to the departmental website: doing public work is different from making academic work public. Online presence may be more than quick blurbs about courses, images of plucky students and faculty bios with informal photos from faraway places. XKCD made this point a decade ago. Post-pandemic academic departments might reconsider its point. 

It’s not just that departments ‘need social media.’ Rather, establishing an online presence may help academics and their departments realize a public-centred pedagogy that pays off in strategic planning. There is likely a correlation between the potential to engage the public and cultivating positive relationships with university administrators. An active online presence and online teaching are rarely paired together. Administrators likely think that ‘going online’ likely means ‘online teaching,’ where conventional higher-ed wisdom sees online teaching as an alternate revenue stream critical to their long-term strategic plans (eg 2013 Babson Report).

Broadly speaking, that thinking structurally alienates academics. Online courses – and their revenues – are usually housed outside departments. Online FTEs are rarely counted in faculty course loads or promotion. In the 2020-2021 academic year, however, the term “massive” is no longer connected to “online” via wishful thinking for university revenues. Overcoming the 75% faculty resistance to teaching online isn’t a stroke of managerial genius or a book about disruption (I used to think I was innovative to urge making use of our classroom portals through collaborative, globally-networked pedagogy. That moment of novelty is over). The urgency of this semester is an opportunity for academics within departments to make use of their new skills to develop an active online presence that supports their teaching.

Hacking Education

How might the shift to remote teaching be gamed and hacked to drive the interests of a department? Audrey Watters’ Hack Education blog continually reminds us to take a critical approach to education and technology. One answer is to employ those new skills to shift emphasis towards a public-oriented, online pedagogical strategy. A useful location to do so is through the department website.

Individual scholarly websites are not likely to serve the long-term interests of post-pandemic academia. They do have the advantage of developing a personalised approach to research and teaching. When maintained with a regular workflow, there is much potential for dynamic content development that serves an individual’s teaching. Their liabilities include issues of narrow topical focus and significant costs of individual time and money. Department websites, on the other hand, have the same potential to situate all the above in a wider context of that can more easily reference each other. Additionally, departmental websites can be useful to protect its people who invest in public scholarship, too.

We will survive

When the shift to remote learning took place, REL’s faculty already had shared, basic skills applying their knowledge of critical cultural theory to web design, image manipulation, layout, audio and video production, network and cloud file sharing and collaborative project work. They were already teaching themselves and their students how to engage a variety of publics. The department had long been asking the questions posed in James M Van Wyck’s 2018 review of English department websites:

  • Who is our audience?
  • What does this page need to say and do?
  • What kind of writing is called for in the moment? That is, how do we engage a skeptical public, members of which walk our halls, perhaps as they consider majoring in [X area of study]?

The original objective of REL’s going online remains. The website is a resource to shape the department’s academic persona. Linking that site to other online platforms increases the ability to reach a variety of audiences with specific narratives. We now teach this approach as a core course in our recently-launched graduate program. By March 2020, that history of faculty participation in online, public pedagogy developed a collective knowledge and skills base that simplified the shift to remote teaching. The take-away here for other departments may be the importance of leveraging their websites as an internal strategy for academic continuity.

Nathan RB Loewen is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, USA. Loewen teaches on philosophy of religion, Asian studies, and digital/public humanities. Loewen co-organizes the Global-Critical Philosophy of Religion project. His current research applies machine learning to support qualitative scholarship on cross-cultural religious studies.