What can the higher education data and insight we've explored and discussed in 2025 do to guide us in preparing international marketing and recruitment strategies for 2026?
‘tis the season to sit back, reflect and take stock and, if you’ll pardon the festive lyrical reference, look to the future.
If you’re me, that means looking to Keystone’s unique combination of search and survey data and asking how the trends we’ve seen in the past year will develop during – and potentially shape – international education in the year to come.
After all, 2025 has been a turbulent year, but it’s also been a highly varied one. Dramatic pivots for high profile study destinations have developed alongside equally significant shifts in where else and how else audiences intend to study. All of these stories will continue to develop during 2026 and our data will continue to help tell them. Here are five of the most important, as I see them right now.
I last talked about these trends quite recently at Keystone’s Future of Higher Education event in New York and in a blog post reflecting on the conversations there. Then I was describing dramatic shifts over the past two years, with very different policy changes driving a 47% fall in US interest and a 50% increase in UK interest (as well as slightly steeper falls for Australia and Canada).
But updating that time series with more data from the second half of 2025 sees those shifts pause for the first time in quite some time. Interest in the USA is no longer falling as of Q4 2025. In fact, it’s stable. And interest in the UK is no longer rising. In fact, it’s dropped very slightly (by two percentage points from Q3 to Q4).
Are we seeing the impact of the UK’s new immigration policy filtering into search trends, with the confirmation that post-study-work entitlements will be cut for new students in 2026? And is US interest benefiting from a period of relative calm and some positive statements on international education? Possibly. It’s certainly a trend to watch for 2026 – and we will be.
Recent stories for the UK have focussed on ‘supply side’ changes, with some universities being more cautious in markets with higher visa refusal rates (driven by stricter thresholds set by government). The sector will also be taking stock of the new international fee levy, which, as a flat fee rather than a percentage, will impact some providers more heavily than others.
But we may now be seeing the first signs of ‘demand side’ shifts from prospective students. I mentioned above that search interest in the UK had finally stopped growing and dipped slightly.
Something else we’re seeing is slightly reduced demand for January, based on Keystone’s survey data:
Here I’ve compared the proportion of people currently seeking to start a Masters in January and September 2026 with the equivalent data from November last year.
Whereas we’d normally expect to see interest in January above September at this time of the year (as audiences explore and prepare for their next entry point) we’re now seeing the reverse, with 46% of this sample (comprised of prospective international Masters students) looking further ahead to September 2026.
On its own it doesn’t necessarily indicate a dramatic shift, but it could indicate that audiences are more inclined to ‘wait and see’ as UK policy changes take effect.
As much as 2025 has been about shifts within the Big 4, it’s also been a year in which we’ve seen interest growing across other less traditional regions. That’s a story we’ve tried to tell with our data, spotlighting growth across Africa, Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
But it’s also happening closer to home (for us, at least!) in Europe and, particularly, Scandinavia.
Jack has been looking into the rise of the Nordic destinations with a 33% increase in interest across the year so far – a lot of it coming from elsewhere in Europe, but also from familiar ‘sending’ regions in Africa and South Asia.
As always, we can combine survey and search data to identify some of the drivers for this, with audiences rating Nordic countries particularly highly for safety and political stability.
We’re also seeing positive trends for Europe more broadly. In fact, five of the top ten destinations in Keystone’s search data for November are European, with Spain, Italy, Germany and France all recording more interest than Canada and Australia – and Spain not far off the UK.
All eyes will, understandably, be on the Big 4 for 2026, but we shouldn’t overlook what’s happening elsewhere. And we won’t.
If you want to hear more about how this story fits into broader global shifts then I'd recommend a recent podcast interview with Keystone's CEO Fredrik Högemark, addressing one of the most dynamic shifts in student demand from the perspective of over 20 years in international education.
Much of this diversification is generated by growing awareness of alternative destinations (something our platforms exist to enable) but it’s also driven by audiences switching from the Big 4.
Here we see survey data asking prospective Bachelors and Masters students whether they plan to apply for international study as normal in the coming year:
Around 1/5 of audiences say they’re considering switching their destination or delaying their application and the pattern looks more or less as we’d expect: UK intentions are the most robust, with only 9% planning to switch and a mere 5% intending to defer; US intentions are more volatile, with 14% intending to switch (the highest of the Big 4). So, whilst the majority of audiences remain committed to their study abroad plans, there is a meaningful ‘floating’ segment and this is a trend we’ll monitor going into 2026.
This also makes our data for ‘second choice’ options more significant. We know that audiences will typically consider several options for study abroad and our survey therefore asks respondents what their preferred alternative would be.
Looking again at interest within the Big 4, we see that the UK is the top second-choice option for audiences considering the USA or Canada, with Canada the preferred alternative for Australia-focused audiences and for overall. The popularity of Canada might seem strange given its search trends (above) but it’s probably benefitting from an element of geographical ‘anchoring’ here as an alternative to the USA.
What’s particularly interesting is how well Germany does: coming in as the fourth-most-popular alternative overall. Here we have another indicator of interest shifting towards Europe amongst audiences who would otherwise have focused on Big 4 study.
If I had to pick just one of these stories to focus on in 2026, it would probably be this one.
The growth of trans-national education has been a consistent theme during 2025, which makes a lot of sense in world where traditional destinations are scrutinising the impact of expanding physical international recruitment.
We’ve also seen growing student interest in this option, which makes sense in a world where the above scrutiny is making physical study abroad more complex, more expensive and, in some cases, less certain. I first looked at this in June when our survey found that just over 1/3 of prospective international students would consider studying instead at an international campus in their home country. That proportion has stayed more or less stable heading into autumn: a strong indicator that growth in the availability and awareness of this option could be met by latent student demand.
I promised five datapoints to watch in this post and I’ll stick to that. But there will, of course, be far more than five stories to tell through our data in 2026 and, right now, I have no idea what some of them will be. Any more than I could have predicted all of the shifts and their impacts that we’ve seen during 2025.
I hope some of what we see in the next year is a bit less dramatic and I’m excited to see where some of the more positive shifts develop. Either way, we’ll be helping to make sense of things through our data, with some exciting plans for Keystone’s insight in the coming months.
So let’s see what the story ends up being for 2026. Same time next year?
Dr. Mark Bennett
Dr. Mark Bennett is the VP of Research and Insights at Keystone Education Group. Leveraging Keystone's unique data and insights, Mark regularly presents on global higher education trends, recruitment, and policy topics, having previously spoken at events organized by NAFSA, CASE Universities Marketing Forum (UMF), HELOA, NAGAP, ContentEd, the UK Council for Graduate Education (UKCGE), Westminster Forum and others. Mark taught at multiple UK universities prior to joining Keystone and holds a PhD in gothic literature from the University of Sheffield.