Students are moving about the Commonwealth more than ever, but those from poor countries are in danger of being left out. David Jobbins reports on the first full study of student mobility in seven years

Student mobility within the Commonwealth is growing - but largely because Australia and the United Kingdom are competing with increasing success in the international student market, according to a study to be published next week.

The first full study of student mobility for more than seven years concludes that higher fees and fewer scholarships have cut opportunities for students from poorer counties. The report by a joint working group of the Council for Education in the Commonwealth and Ukcosa: The Council for International Education, warns that these factors add to the intellectual and economic marginalisation highlighted by a World Bank/Unesco task force as an imminent danger.

"The Commonwealth and its member states need to recognise and address this peril," it says in a message for the organisation's education ministers when they meet in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in November.

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A superficially positive picture of Commonwealth student mobility conceals some more negative aspects, including a marked skewing of mobility patterns in favour of just a very few host and sending countries out of the 54 Commonwealth members.

Some host countries have vigorously and successfully entered the world market for international students, but the report says that ever-greater imbalances in access to higher education are occurring between the less developed and the more developed countries within the Commonwealth.

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The ability of poorer countries, most notably in Africa, to share in international student mobility has fallen. "With the end of the cold war, they are no longer so important as theatres of competition among the big powers for cultural and political influence," the report says. Countries such as Iran, Iraq and Nigeria have fallen from being major exporters of international students 25 years ago to relative insignificance now.

However, exchanges among countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and flows from East and Southeast Asia have grown rapidly. "At the same time, even in poor countries, the liberalisation of financial markets has enabled a minority of wealthy individuals who are disenchanted with the quality of higher education at home to pay for an education for their sons and daughters abroad."

Particularly in the Commonwealth, the commoditisation of study abroad and changes in international development priorities and programmes have led to an increasing polarity in study-abroad opportunities between high and low-income countries, and between rich and poor people within countries.

Among its detailed findings, the report says that:

* A "very healthy" increase of 76 per cent between 1990 and 1996 in the number of Commonwealth students studying in a member state means that such traffic now accounts for 11.6 per cent of global student mobility, compared with 9 per cent six years earlier

* Commonwealth students who choose a Commonwealth country over another destination have risen from 33 per cent to 44 per cent of all Commonwealth students abroad

* Buoyant Australian and UK recruitment masks downward trends elsewhere. For example, both Canada (despite taking 30 per cent more international students overall) and India hosted fewer Commonwealth students in 1996 than in 1990

* In the UK, the proportion of international students that came from Commonwealth countries fell from 41 per cent to 30 per cent in six years. In Australia, it dropped from 55 per cent to 48 per cent

* Four countries in East and Southeast Asia - Brunei Darussalam, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore - accounted for 61 per cent of the Commonwealth students enrolled in Australia, Canada and the UK.

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The last attempt at an overall picture of higher education interchange within the Commonwealth was more than seven years ago. Since then, the context has changed drastically, the report says. Factors that affect the character of international student mobility include the tendency to treat education as a commodity, shifts in the economic and political fortunes of individual countries and changing priorities in international assistance to education in developing countries.

During the 1990s there was a global rise in the flow of students between countries - a rise of 37 per cent between 1990 and 1996. Much of that increase was within Europe. In the world at large, most of the flow was among countries rated high or medium on the United Nations Development Programme's human development index.

Opportunities for a vast spread in the mobility of knowledge have been opened by the new borderless learning and the possibilities of new technologies. But the working group does not see the movement of knowledge as displacing movement of students.

"There are benefits to institutions and nations and to the academic community around the world in the presence of international students in universities outside their own country. The hosts benefit in strengthening of disciplinary offerings and research. International students take home new knowledge and perspectives (although the issue of possible brain drain has to be acknowledged) and all students involved in the encounter should gain greater cultural understanding and therefore be better fitted for a world drawn closer by new communications."

The report recommends that the Commonwealth and its members should welcome these changes and ensure that they benefit international students. "Governments ought to collaborate to provide intelligence on and analysis of developments in the new forms of learning provision, and in this context Commonwealth ministers of education would be well advised to examine a new positioning for the Commonwealth of Learning."

It warns that member countries low on the human development index will still lose unless they get help to create the technological infrastructure needed for access to the internet.

While the Commonwealth has achieved a better balance between men and women in student interchanges, some subject disciplines have very few women and there is a smaller proportion of women in postgraduate research than at lower levels. "As in the world as a whole, so in the Commonwealth, rhetoric about gender balance has moved further than action - for instance in the allocation between men and women of scholarships and awards."

The main recommendations to the Commonwealth include:

* Giving priority to promoting student mobility that will lead to more participation by countries low on the human development index and fostering more higher education cooperation between developing countries

* Moving to meeting the full target of 2,000 awards under the Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Plan and broadening the donor base for awards.

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Student Mobility on the Map: Tertiary Education Interchange in the Commonwealth on the Threshold of the 21st Century , ISBN 1 870679 33 4, price ?20.00, published by Ukcosa: The Council for International Education, 9-17 St Albans Place, London N1 0NX

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