Where Would You Go to University? Each Country's Number One Study Destination, 1999 to 2023, from UNESCO Data

Where do a country's students go when they study abroad? I use the bilateral table of internationally mobile tertiary students published by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), in which each host country reports its students by country of origin, to find each country's number one destination in every year from 1999 to 2023. Reporting gaps are filled only between reported years, and countries whose answer could change because a large host gives no breakdown are flagged rather than hidden. In 2023 the table counts 6,234,900 students in 114 hosts. The United States is the most common number one (38 countries), followed by the United Kingdom (28), France (16), Australia (15) and Germany (11). Old routes persist: Russia is number one for all five Central Asian republics and Portugal for every Portuguese-speaking African country, but France's share of students from French-speaking sub-Saharan Africa fell from 57% to 29%. New hosts have grown fast: Turkey's international students rose 16.6 times from 2005 to 2023, and it is now first for Syria, Azerbaijan and Iran. India has not overtaken China as a sender worldwide on UNESCO's estimate (833,835 against 1,076,015), but it has in the United Kingdom, which HESA's provider-level data confirm for 2022/23. China, the United Arab Emirates and Singapore report no origins, which is the main limit of the method. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/study-abroad/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/study-abroad. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/28/study-abroad/.