How to Identify High-Growth and Emerging Source Cities

The Global Student Flows (GSF) Index helps you identify high-growth and emerging source cities by analysing student mobility patterns between specific cities and destinations over time.

By applying the right filters, you can uncover cities that are growing rapidly as sources of international students.

Immediately after navigating to the Global Student Flows dataset, right away on the Overview Report, you can see, at a glance, an overview of the top Source cities of international students (see screenshot below):

This bar graph shows you the top 10 source cities worldwide with the total amount of students, and also relevant CAGR for the selected Time Period.

From the main menu, navigate to the third option on the Reports bar named Charts. From this dropdown, selection option Silhouette and then toggle to "Silhouette - Source City":

This visualisation is an excellent option to have a singular focus on a time-series graph of specific cities as comparative tiles.

Note - the defaults are "Global" both for Source and Destination:

However, you can also select and filter for specific sub-region as Source and a specific Country as a destination.

For example, if you were in student recruitment at a French university and were the Regional Market Manager for Latin America, you might apply the filters as follows:

An alternative to the above which makes an excellent geographical visualisation is the Flat Map:

With the Flat Map, also like previous charts mentioned, the default for Source and Destination is "Global", but can be amended based on need.

Another way to visualise the top Source City data is by using our Scatter Plot chart.

To find the Scatter Plot Report, go to the last report on the Reports bar called Analysis and choose "Scatter" from the drop-down.

Then change the "Bubble" dropdown from "Source Location" to "Source City"

*Soon the Scatter Plot chart will be able to be either shared as a URL or exported as a PDF, JPEG, PNG file.

In the Index, use the Source and Destination filters to define the city-level flow you want to analyse.

Important:
If both Source and Destination are left as Global, the Index will not load. At least one side of the analysis must be set to a specific city or destination.

Once a valid source–destination combination is selected, the Index will display data at city level, allowing you to:

Use the time-based views in the Index to analyse how student flows from specific cities evolve: