The Global Student Supply Chain from South Korea to the United States

Despite its small population, South Korea has been consistently the third largest sender of international students to the American higher education sector for the last two decades. Previous work explaining this phenomenon often focuses on students’ desires for a global education alongside universities’ student recruitment efforts. Less understood is the role of other actors who broker the relationship between universities and students. Drawing from her recently published book Constructing Student Mobility (The MIT Press, 2023), higher education scholar Stephanie Kim illustrates how an expansive ecosystem of ancillary people and organizations funnel students to specific universities according to market demands, from education agents in South Korea to community college recruiters in California. Kim ultimately shows how these diverse stakeholders constitute a much broader industry of global higher education and reinforce the global student supply chain from South Korea to the United States.

Stephanie K. Kim is a scholar, educator, author, and practitioner in higher education. A specialist in comparative and international higher education, she researches and writes about international students and higher education policy in the United States and countries in Asia. She is a faculty member at Georgetown University, where she is Associate Professor of the Practice in the School of Continuing Studies and Faculty Director of the Master's in Higher Education Administration. She also serves as Senior Editor of the Journal of International Students and has held fellowships with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), East-West Center, and Fulbright Program. Prior to arriving at Georgetown, she held academic and administrative positions at UC Berkeley and received her Ph.D. in Education from UCLA.

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