Trump’s victory causes steep spike in study abroad inquiries

In what has been described as an unprecedented shift in interest, the number of American college and university students seeking information about studying abroad through international study choice platform Studyportals increased five-fold the day after Donald J Trump’s re-election to the presidency, figures show.

It was a spike that caused Cara Skikne, Studyportals’ head of communication and thought leadership, to say “Woah” out loud. “We generally keep an eye on student data when there are big geopolitical events,” she wrote in an email in which she shared the dramatic data with University World News.

Since mid-August, the graph seen by Skikne showed that between 2,000 and 3,000 American undergraduates and graduate students signed on to the Netherland-based Studyportals, used by 55 million prospective students from 240 countries seeking information about studying abroad.

On 6 November, however, the number of inquiries had jumped more than five times the previous day’s total to 10,801.

Studyportals co-founder and CEO Edwin van Rest said it was “unprecedented to see a rapid shift in interest of this magnitude”.

University vote fails to materialise

While Kamala Harris garnered 54% of 18-24-year-old vote (60% of whom are enrolled in either junior college or four-year institutions), according to NBC’s exit polls, this figure is actually 1% lower than President Joe Biden scored four years ago. His victory in the key battleground state of Michigan was secured by the 194,000 college student votes he received.

Harris lost Pennsylvania by 130,531 and despite the scenes of long lines at universities such as Lehigh University (Bethlehem, Pennsylvania), it would appear that the university vote Harris had counted on did not materialise either in this key swing state or in Wisconsin, where she had counted on running up her totals in the college town of Madison to offset the more conservative rural areas of the state and in Michigan.

Following Trump’s win, Google also saw a spike in the number of inquiries about how to move to Canada, with 100,000 inquiries being made at 6.30 pm on 6 November and about 75,000 being made several times before 8 pm.

Eight years earlier, the surge in inquiries crashed the website of the Canadian immigration department. In the end, after Trump’s first election, fewer than 1,000 Americans moved to Canada because of Trump.

Student mobility

Students however, are more mobile than the general population and hundreds of thousands of them take a semester or year at another university or in another country, not to mention the fact that millions of university students move from home to attend higher education institutions.

Accordingly, for college and university students the idea of moving to attend school is hardly foreign.

Additionally, as has been covered in these pages, tens of thousands of American students have made their decisions about where to attend college or university based upon various states’ laws restricting or allowing abortion, which shows that American college students often do take into account politics when making their decisions.

Referring to the international study inquiries, Van Rest said: “We saw similar trends in the last Trump presidency, but not at this scale. That being said, we will need to see how the trend develops.”

According to Studyportals’ data, on the day after the election, the countries American students were most interested in were the UK (2,287, an increase of 530% compared with the day before), Canada (1,629, an increase of 825%), Germany (1,189, an increase of 317%), Ireland (1,077, an increase of 1,298%) and the Netherlands (860, an increase of 369%). Also on the list are Italy, France, Sweden, Spain and Australia.

Van Rest said that regardless of political motivations it would be a good thing for more Americans to study in other countries anyway – both from the point-of-view of the international education ecosystem and because it contributes to world peace.

“It would be a positive development to have more US students studying abroad. It would make international education more symmetrical, and international education in general promotes more tolerance, understanding and peace in the world,” said Van Rest.