Prospective international students aren't just turning away from the Big 4 or seeking out study opportunities in alternative destination countries; new data suggests they may be becoming increasingly likely to search much closer to home.
We spend a lot of our time at Keystone mapping how international interest is evolving. It’s what our ‘Share of Search’ data is designed to do, by measuring what audiences actually look for on our websites and making those trends comparable across different combinations of origins and destinations over time.
Most of the time we find ourselves updating similar stories: how are the ‘Big 4’ (Australia, Canada, the UK and the USA) competing with each other and what do the latest policy announcements mean (or not mean) for their student interest. My colleague, Ines, covered some of this recently when looking at findings from our 2026 State of Student Recruitment report.
Some of the time we find ourselves looking at the emergence of ‘alternative’ destinations – countries that are starting to attract a greater share of international student interest alongside the Big 4. Ines has rounded up some of these stories too.
But this time I want to talk about something different: when international search interest isn’t quite as “international” as we expect. The best way to show you that is with a chart.
Here's that chart:
We’re looking here at a comparison of international search interest (so, searches for these countries but not from these countries) at Masters level (based on FindAMasters) in H1 2026 compared with H2 2025.
We’re looking at a recent trend rather than a year-over-year comparison as the latter would ‘bake in’ some odd trends (we’d be comparing the USA to its 2025 nadir and the UK to a period before its recent peak).
The top of the chart – the bit we’re used to looking at – mostly makes sense and tallies with recent trends and the wider policy context. The USA is still down (having opened 2026 with an extended travel ban), the UK is down slightly (having opened 2026 by confirming a cut to post-study work and rising visa refusals) and Canada is also down slightly (but potentially recovering over time). Australia benefits from its comparison period in this cut but has been doing better in recent quarters.
New Zealand doing so well also makes sense and isn’t the first time we’ve told this story.
And then there’s India. Growing by more than 100% compared to the second half of last year. This is relative growth, not size (India is not the fifth most popular study destination overall) but the trend is dramatic and makes sense in context. I’d expect to see European countries doing well as Big 4 interest wanes and we’ve looked elsewhere at the growth in interest in parts of Asia. South Africa is also an interesting companion to India as a source country growing as a destination (more on that in a moment).
The India trend also appears to be a genuine signal over time, too:
Here we’re looking at interest in India from non-Indian audiences by quarter, from 2024 to now. To enable comparison, the data is a rolling z score, measuring when interest is above or below the average for this period and by how much (how is interest growing and when is it highest, essentially). I’ve plotted it against the UK and the USA here for context (we wouldn’t normally look at specifically non-Indian interest for either of these, but it provides a comparison for the India trend).
The most obvious explanation for rising interest in India, as with any destination outside the Big 4, is what’s been taking place within the Big 4: as policy barriers become more frequent and less predictable in familiar destinations, audiences elsewhere in South Asia (and beyond) will have more reason to look elsewhere, including closer to home.
Another factor potentially explains why audiences might look closer to home specifically, as opposed to further afield with evidence of rising airfares in 2026 due to disruption to flight routes and volatility in fuel prices driven by the current conflict in and around Iran. These first two may explain why South Africa does well in the earlier chart, as African students also look to study more regionally.
A third possibility is that regional interest is being driven up innately by the rising profile of Indian universities alongside investment in TNE. According to C-BERT data, India already hosts 5 branch campuses and has established 19 elsewhere. Its universities have been improving their global rankings and enrolling more international students.
The reality is that all of these – and other – factors will be in play here. But the signal is that audiences will shift their search behaviour in this way regardless. That matters for the prospective partnerships and relationships that are driving strategies such as the UK’s. It’s also another indicator that the international education landscape may be evolving quite differently, in ways we’ll keep monitoring.
With thanks to The PIE for covering some of this data.