ABSTRACT
This chapter considers three questions concerning the approach of governments in countries which face an outflow of international students, a proportion of whom will not return home. It examines the particular priorities of seven quite different sending countries China, Greece, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Timor-Leste and Vietnam. The problem of student migration has for decades been framed within broader conceptualizations of 'brain drain' and 'brain circulation'. While in recent years these concepts have been applied mainly to mobility from the global south to the global north, the British Royal Society is credited with coining the term 'brain drain' to refer to the outflow of scientists from Europe to the USA and Canada in the 1950s and 1960s. Later, the term was taken up much more broadly to describe the widespread flow of skilled migrants from low-income to high-income countries. It is Singapore that student migration has been of most significance as a policy issue.
