Then and Now

So far I have approached the topic of Indian overseas students in Australia from a migration perspective. From the start, it was clear that the majority of Indian students come to Australia with a so-called ‘double intent’: they are there for the purpose of both education and migration. However, this situation is not reflected in the visa with which they enter Australia; on paper, they are simply ‘overseas students’. This is also how they are talked about in the press, and how they appear in statistics. This chapter will focus on this dilemma. While in the previous chapter these students were placed in a historic framework of Indian migrants arriving in Australia, this chapter will focus simply on the history of ‘studying abroad’, and, more in particular, on the history of overseas students in Australia. Rather than fieldwork data, a reading of academic books and papers published on the topic of international education in the past hundred years forms the basis of this chapter. Special attention will be paid to the issue of non-returning students – students who have come to a particular country to study but then decide to stay on, or who simply never return to where they come from. The relevancy of doing so is simple: although studying abroad is often understood as a consequence of increasing globalization, it remains a rather narrowly defined concept by itself, leaving little room for understanding the people who fall under this category as anything but ‘overseas students’.