The Impact of Studying Abroad Versus Pursuing Higher Education in One's Home Country

Abstract

This article examines the decision that students face between studying abroad and pursuing higher education in their home country, with particular attention to Arab and Maghrebi students who have chosen Türkiye as their destination. It seeks to understand the factors shaping this choice, including academic opportunity, career prospects, cultural exposure, financial conditions, and personal growth. Adopting a mixed-methods design grounded in the pragmatic paradigm, the study administered a questionnaire to international students in Istanbul, primarily from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Lebanon. Open-ended responses were examined through thematic analysis, while closed-ended responses were summarized using descriptive statistics. The small sample size is treated transparently as a limitation within an exploratory framework rather than a basis for generalization. Four themes emerged from the data: the primacy of personal and experiential motivation; the pursuit of economic and career opportunity; cultural curiosity and the project of self-development; and the contested quality of education in the host country. The most distinctive finding is that several respondents described their decision as driven less by academic ambition than by personal motivations, including the desire for new experiences and the specific appeal of Istanbul as a city and a dimension the dominant instrumental models of student mobility tend to overlook.

The findings further reveal that decision making is shaped not only by academic considerations but also by non-educational motivations such as personal freedom, cultural curiosity, economic opportunity, and safety. Perceptions of host-country educational quality varied markedly, demonstrating a reference-dependent character that challenges accounts treating destination quality as a fixed pull factor. By foregrounding the under-researched perspective of Arab and Maghrebi students in Türkiye, the study contributes a contextually grounded account to the wider literature on international student mobility.