International Students in Turkey: Consumers of Turkish Higher Education, Important Actors of “Soft Power” or Unwanted Future Migrants?

Turkey offers an interesting case for discussing the mobility of international students since the country with international university students now numbering over 300,000, is the eighth most popular destination for international students globally and a leading destination in the Global South. This paper discusses how international students are perceived in the public opinion in Turkey and how this relates to global and local issues. Firstly, international higher education is promoted domestically as an increasingly lucrative Turkish export in the global knowledge economy, with international students presented as consumers of Turkish higher education and competition between universities to attract those students. Secondly, international students are also presented as potentially important actors in the expansion of Turkish soft power in Africa, Central Asia, and the Arab world. This phenomenon is exemplified by the creation of the state-run Türkiye Scholarships Program (Türkiye Bursları) in 2012—a program that reportedly received 117,000 applications from 162 countries in 2023 and which now awards 5,000 undergraduate and graduate scholarships to international students annually. Thirdly, in the context of larger social controversy about foreign migration to Turkey (a country hosting the largest refugee population in the world, international students also become the targets of anti-migrant rhetoric. The paper argues that it is important to introduce migration-mobility nexus in the analysis since competing frames of “mobility” and “migration” similarly influence how universities, state institutions, and mass media understand and describe the situation of international students studying in Turkey.