Of ‘international exposure’, place and mobility trajectories: domestic students and international students in the education hub of Dubai

ABSTRACT

In 2023, the UAE hosted the second largest number of international branch campuses in the world. They cater for ‘local’ Emirati students and the large resident community of ‘expatriates’, but there also is a growing number of international students coming to study in Dubai from abroad. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with students in Dubai, this paper compares the locational and study choices of international and domestic students at international branch campuses. The findings show that the domestic students often opt to study locally due to the more affordable tuition fees and gendered expectations to stay close to their families. Meanwhile for international students, the prestige associated with certain international branch campuses, usually is a decisive factor in motivating them to study in Dubai, alongside concerns for safety and proximity to their country of usual residence. In addition, many international students believe that Dubai’s reputation as a ‘world’ city, which attracts people, goods, and investments from various part of the world, and the transnational education they are engaged in, will enable them to benefit from ‘international exposure’. Both international and domestic students regard the academic credentials they attain in Dubai as potentially paving the way for the realisation of post-study aspirations.

Acknowledgements

I would like thank the guest editors of this special issue and the three anonymous reviewers for their feedback, which helped me to improve the paper. This research would not have been possible without the generous funding for my Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship. Finally, I would like to thank my research participants for taking part in this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Unesco UIS database outlines two operational definitions that are widely used to identify mobile students and their countries of origin (a) students who are not usual residents of their country of study, i.e., those who have recently moved to the destination (host) country from somewhere else; and (b) students who received their prior qualifying education in another country, indicating that they have crossed a border. As is the case for the UAE, the UIS also accepts (c) country of citizenship as a proxy in countries/territories where residence or prior education does not yield the country of origin of mobile students.

2 Several of my interlocutors said that generally it was the families with multiple children that preferred to send their offspring to attend university in India, because the cost of multiple children attending university in Dubai was prohibitive.

3 The fact that the UAE is a safe country was frequently mentioned in the narratives of my interviewees. Yet, it is important to highlight that this research was conducted shortly after the Nirbhaya case went to trial in December 2018. In 2012, the young female student, Jyoti Singh Pandey, was raped and tortured on a public bus in Delhi and died of her injuries a few days later. These and other similar cases in India were widely discussed in the media at the time.

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 under the H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions grant agreement no. 706550.