Search trends tell us where prospective students are browsing the 'shop window' of international education, but how much further do they go?
Nearly three million people have searched for international study on just one of Keystone’s websites so far this year. You’re probably more used to me talking more about what those people do than how many of them there are (and we will, in just moment) but that number is worth pausing to acknowledge.
Despite unprecedented change (most of it policy-related) the death of international education is somewhat overstated. Instead, as I wrote here last time, it’s really just getting more complicated.
I want to talk about another aspect of that complication today.
I am, it will not surprise you to learn, a big fan of Keystone’s Share of Search data. It is the best way I know to measure pure prospective student demand, based on what those nearly three million searchers actually do on our platforms.
Understanding how people are searching and how that’s changing is a really useful barometer of prospective student interest, which is why we share it with the sector. After all, search and discovery is upstream of everything else that matters in recruitment and enrolment.
When we look at it, it looks like this:
That’s a breakdown of the most-searched destinations in the first half of this year. It tells a story. In this case it’s a story of the U.S. still being immensely popular, despite that popularity falling (because a destination like the U.S. has a long way to fall). And it’s a story of Europe accounting for a large proportion of search interest ‘beyond the Big 4’ (largely non-anglophone Europe too). And it’s a story of China now being in the top 10 (it was 14th last year).
It’s interesting. But it’s also window shopping. Because that’s what search is.
Study permit limits, visa refusals, international fee levies, ambitions to fundamentally change post-study work options… all sat there on the metaphorical store shelves. But they’re sat there alongside a lot of very attractive degree programs that people do still want to study.
So, what if we could follow prospective students a little further, into the shop?
The next steps after searching for study abroad are finding it and taking action with it. Effectively, entering the shop and eventually approaching the counter. Now that metaphor is simplifying something quite complicated (which is somewhat the point of a metaphor) as students can ‘approach the counter’ in lots of ways and with different kinds of baskets. Taking action can mean sending different types of enquiry, visiting a university website or opting in to other forms of activity and communication. Those things happen at different rates in different places for different people.
But I’ve been having a go at measuring them anyway, because if we can do that, we can start to see not just where prospective students are looking, but where they’re most confident in taking that search further.
Here’s what that looks like if I compare how likely searching students are to actively enquire about a program after viewing it across some of the top destinations for international study in H1 2026 so far (here ordered by their likelihood to convert from a view to an enquiry).
To make this chart consistent, readable (and simple!) we’re looking at whether a destination is above or below the overall average. All of these destinations are engaging students: we’re interested in how they compare.
The first thing I’ll note is that this data ‘checks out’, as they say in insights-land. Three of the ‘Big 4’ are comfortably below average, with the UK doing least-worst (roughly what we see in search). Canada is doing better and has generally done better in international education news this year.
Elsewhere the ‘winners’ are concentrated in Europe where the pattern loosely follows affordability (I can’t confirm that’s the driver and I doubt it’s as simple as that, but it makes sense for a list that runs from Portugal, Hungary and Spain down towards Finland and Sweden).
The UAE success is interesting, reflecting an emerging destination and one that’s likely to benefit from ongoing growth in TNE interest (the UAE also happens to be the highest converting destination for Indian audiences).
There are interesting patterns if we look at audience interest within specific destinations. Here I’m comparing how frequently audiences take further action after viewing a program in the UK, U.S. and Germany.
For simplicity, I’ve picked five of the largest origin countries for international enrolments, based on 2023 UNESCO enrolment data: China, India, Nigeria, Vietnam and South Korea. Each bar compares the audience’s likelihood to convert for a given destination to its likelihood to convert overall.
So, Chinese audiences are slightly more likely to convert on German programs than they are overall and slightly less likely to do so on U.S. programs, with the UK more or less neutral – but the differences are slight (less than 1pp difference).
Indian audiences are moderately less likely to convert on U.S. programs and moderately more likely to convert on UK programs – again, with small differences.
Nigeria is much less likely to convert on U.S. programs, which is unsurprising given its been subject to a travel ban since the start of this year. Conversion for the UK is also relatively low (which may reflect reaction to three quarters of rising visa refusal rates).
The pattern across destinations matches what we saw above: the U.S. underperforms for all audiences, Germany generally does well (it’s only slightly below average for India and Nigeria) and the UK is mixed (it still does well for India, is down somewhat for Nigeria and about par elsewhere).
This data tells a story about prospective student confidence that gets us a level below search.
That story isn’t necessarily surprising. It makes sense that prospective students will be more hesitant about study in the Big 4 now, just as we see them becoming less likely to search for these destinations.
But conversion is still happening – these datapoints represent thousands of them. And universities can shape action more directly than search. Clear positioning and appeal can encourage more students to overcome actual or imagined policy hurdles.
And the story emerging for smaller or emerging destinations is a very encouraging one. Portugal gets significantly less global search volume than the U.S. across Keystone platforms (if you go back to the first chart, you’ll see it in 12th place with 2% to the U.S. 19%). That probably won’t surprise you. But Portugal converts significantly more of the interest it captures. The same is true for Spain, Italy, Germany and others.
As crude as the metaphor is, getting more prospective students to the counter is a big opportunity for those destinations that aren’t as obvious in the shop window. And what happens at the counter still matters for those who are.