Dear Hasan,

I see that some contributors are confusing the term post-secondary and higher education. People in post-secondary may be attending vocational education, internships, short courses or diplomas that are not regarded as higher education in many countries that I know of. The definition of tertiary/higher education you mention above is the most accurate in that respect.

Dear Hasan,

I suggest you look at the UNESCO figures:

http://www.uis.unesco.org/Education/Pages/tertiary-education.aspx

The Institute of International Education tracks these figures, so I have included the link for you and also a study I did on international students referring to some of these statistics.

Best regards,

Debra

http://www.iie.org/Research-and-Publications/Open-Doors#.WCCPDP2FNMw

Data Generation I: International and invisible in a workforce edu...

You will never be able to get an EXACT figure, as students are registering and de-registering every day. Students are dropping out and dying. At best you can get an approximation.

You need also to be careful to define when a student is regarded as being a bone fide international tertiary student. Do you include students at fly-by-night colleges? Distance education students? How can you include all countries and islands? Do you count part-time students as half students? One third students? How are you going to extrapolate the available figures from 2014 to the end of 2016? How accurate must the figure be? Why do you want the figure?

You can check this kind of info in EAIE website. Probably, they have reports published here http://www.eaie.org/eaie-resources.html. If not, try IIE and ESN websites. But, sincerely, I am sure that it is not possible to find exact numbers. 

Hi Hasan,

Not exactly what your looking for but some info on international students from China and Indonesia.

Thanks Kym. I had a look at the article but the date is 2012. A lot has changed since then. I need new references please.

Hi Hasan!

For 2011: 183 million, 2,6% of world population, taught by about 63 million teachers.Wolframalpha.com, figures from World Bank development index and other sources.  https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=post+secondary+students+world 

These kind of statistics globally (collected statistics from all countries) are often not last year, 2012 is good enough if you don't want to search for figures in every country and add them, a lot of hassle,  Then you can possibly reach 2014 or something.

I also agree with Ian Kennedy on the definition difficulties of the question.  Having said that, what I always do when I want to get the latest figure of something is to use wolframalpha.com , a kind of computational search engine that not only finds figures in statistical databases for you, but also combines different kinds of data and computates them. (you can ask what weather it was in Timbuktu the day Elvis died for example, that kind of combined data and computation tasks.) It takes a while to learn how to formulate what you want, but check examples, videos etc and you will learn in half-an-hour. If it is big computations you have to be a Pro member, but that is quite cheap and can be done for a month only. So I go to WolframAlpha, put in post secondary students world and voilá , 183 million college students, And a nice graph on the development from 1998. Wolframalpha can do a lot of tasks for you very quick, which otherwise takes a day with a browser and Excel. Hope it helps.

Beware, slightly different phrasing of the question gives different answers:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=number+of+tertiary+students

gives 190.3 million as the answer to how many students in post-secondary education.

But this is good enough if you are only establishing the 2012 potential global market for your future, ground-breaking, international, multi-lingual, e-higher-education software!

Be aware also that your original question uses the phrase "international student" which usually refers to a student from country A attending a university in a different country, country B.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=number+of+tertiary+students

Hi Ian!

Interesting - but I see your search results were 2012 results for "post-secondary students" (WolframAlpha interpreted tertiary students) with "all countries, dependencies..." - but 34 countries missing....? My results were 2011 results for "world", that is the World bank had summed it up somehow, and perhaps adjusted something. In your search, primary and secondary students show up at the bottom, which they didn´t in mine. Anyway, it is an interesting tool, and sources can be checked directly. 

The difference between our results might be explained by normal growth. 

As per the UIS data there are  207.5 million  students  enrolled in institutions of higher education  in 2014.

To get more information  and further details visit UIS website ( freely downloadable)

Professor N.V.Varghese, Director, CPRHE/NUEPA

Dear All,

The most reliable data source for  enrollment   which is widely used is UIS. The latest data available from this source is  for the year 2014.

The total enrollment is 207.5 million

The number of international students  is 4.1 million.

With best regards,

Professor N.V.Varghese,

Director, CPRHE/NUEPA, New Delhi

Wolframalpha is a fantastic tool. For detailed research, however, I would rely on the UIS (UNESCO Institute for Statistics) figure - and not only because I used to work there in the education sector :-)

World bank figures will almost always be different from UN figures, because the underlying definitions are different.

For a start, you need to be clear how you define "tertiary student". You may be better off using the UNESCO ISCED code. Then, define clearly your notion of "international". Would you regard a student from Ryadh, enrolled at the U.o. Rabat, as international?

In other words, be guided by your research questions(s).

Thanks for the tips Leopold. Your suggestion for the definition of tertiary education is very valuable. I copied it as:

Tertiary education comprises ISCED levels 5, 6, 7 and 8, which are labelled as short-cycle tertiary education, Bachelor’s or equivalent level, Master’s or equivalent level, and doctoral or equivalent level, respectively.

The word internationalization is taken from (Knight, 2003), who defines it as follows:

Internationalization at the national, sector, and institutional levels is defined as the process of integrating an international, intercultural, or global dimension into the purpose, functions or delivery of postsecondary education. Now, everything is in place. Thank you. However, the original problem still holds. What is the number of students involved in tertiary education outside their own countries?

Thanks again...

There is a wealth of information on the UIS web site: uis.unesco.org, you may start with the Global Education Digest:

http://www.uis.unesco.org/Education/GED%20Documents%20C/GED-2012-Complete-Web3.pdf

You can also access their interactive data bases, although not for the faint of the heart :-)

Dear Hasan,

I see that some contributors are confusing the term post-secondary and higher education. People in post-secondary may be attending vocational education, internships, short courses or diplomas that are not regarded as higher education in many countries that I know of. The definition of tertiary/higher education you mention above is the most accurate in that respect.

@Yurgos. Exactly!

try the following  link for OECD .

http://www.oecd.org/edu/education-at-a-glance-19991487.htm

Nothing about number of tertiary international students Gautam. Thanks anyway...