Key filters in Global Student Flows
Across all reports in Global Student Flows, you’ll find three essential dropdowns in the top right corner:
Source country – Where students originate
Destination country – Where students are studying
Time period – The range of years you want to analyse
These controls drive every report and visualisation, allowing you to quickly switch between different source–destination combinations.
Using the Index to identify top source/destination countries
The Index report ranks territories by the number of students moving between a selected source and destination.
For example, if you set the destination to the United States, the Index - Source Location shows which countries send the most students to the United States over the selected time period.
But you can also group and sort by CAGR (compound annual growth rate).
This view answers a different question: which source countries are growing the fastest for a selected destination. For example, even if a country sends fewer students overall, a high CAGR highlights rapidly emerging markets.
Exploring trends with Charts - Silhouette views
To visualise how student flows change over time, you can switch to the Charts report.
Silhouette by Source Location
The Silhouette (Source Location) view shows how student flows from different source countries trend over the selected time period for a chosen destination. This makes it easy to compare growth or decline across multiple source markets at once.
If you change the destination (for example, from the United States to Canada), the silhouette chart updates automatically to reflect the new destination.
Silhouette by Destination Location
You can also reverse the perspective by selecting Silhouette (Destination Location). This view focuses on inbound flows, showing how different destination territories rank and trend for a given source.
Deep dives with Benchmark and Heatmap reports
Benchmark report
The Benchmark report allows for a focused, country-to-country comparison. By selecting a specific source and destination, you can view a single trend chart showing how student flows between those two territories have changed over the selected time period.
The charts show:
Source countries as rows
Destination countries as columns
Heatmap
The Heatmap provides year-by-year totals of students flowing into a selected destination. Brighter colors indicate higher student volumes, with darker shades representing lower numbers.
This report can also be downloaded as a CSV, making it easy to use the data for external analysis or reporting.
Key Points
To identify Sources for a specific Destination:
Select one of the Source Location Reports
Select a specific location in the Destination filter
To identify Destinations for a specific Source :
Select one of the Destination Location Reports
Select a specific location in the Source filter