Knowledge pursuit across distance: Revealing the multipolar trend of international student attraction with the A-index

Abstract

Competition for comprehensive national power nowadays is essentially a talent competition. International student mobility has traditionally favoured Western countries, but emerging economies are gaining prominence, making accurate quantification of national educational attractiveness increasingly important. Existing methods face limitations: physical attribute approaches fail to capture social dynamics, and network methods focus on flow volume while neglecting distance. We propose the Attractiveness-index (A-index), which comprehensively quantifies countries’ talent attraction capacity by integrating flows, distances, and cross-regional patterns. A-index reveals previously obscured transformations in global education, showing a shift from US dominance to a multipolar landscape where China’s attractiveness grew 397 % (1999-2018), uniquely identifies Australia’s exceptional global reach despite modest raw numbers, and recognises emerging regional educational hubs—insights invisible to traditional metrics. We identify the influences on the A-index’s spatio-temporal evolution and reveal strategic competition patterns among structurally similar economies through spatial spillovers. Sensitivity analysis confirms the A-index’s robustness across different parameter configurations. With a higher correlation coefficient to net student inflow than weighted indegree centrality, the A-index provides a superior methodological foundation for understanding educational resource distribution and developing human-centred strategies in the global talent landscape.

Keywords

International students / Uneven mobility / Attractiveness-index / Spatial lag effect

Data availability

Data will be made available on request.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Yao Lin: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Visualization, Validation, Software, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Hengyu Gu: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Data curation, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Hengyu Gu is an Young Editorial Board Member for this journal and was not involved in the editorial review or the decision to publish this article.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 42571296 and 42301278), Humanities and Social Science Foundation of the Ministry of Education in China (Grant No. 23YJC790032), Young Elite Scientists Sponsorship Program by CAST (Grant No. 2023QNRC001), and Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province (Grant No. KYCX25_0106).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2026.100426 .

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