Southeast Asia in flux: UK told “era of the mega market is over”

Speaking at British Universities’ Liaision Association (BUILA) conference, Jazreel Goh, director Malaysia at the British Council, said outbound mobility from Southeast Asia is still climbing – but destination choices are shifting fast.

Citing the latest comparable data available for all countries in the region, she noted that outbound mobility from Southeast Asia rose by 5.7% in 2023.

“The question here is not whether these students want to go overseas. It’s a matter of where they are choosing to study,” she told delegates at the Glasgow confence.

While Australia, the US and the UK remain “very very important destinations”, she highlighted the growing pull of regional hubs including Japan, South Korea and Malaysia, and strong flows into China and Taiwan.

Malaysia in particular, she said, is the “rising star” in student recruitment within Southeast Asia – combining affordability, improving rankings and strong government support.

At school level, Anthony Partington, CEO of XCL Education in Malaysia, is already seeing this new hub role play out. His private schools group educates around 20,000 students across Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Singapore, largely in a British curriculum.

He described Malaysia as “a real hub for education in Southeast Asia”, noting that “the majority of our recruitment into our schools now are students coming from other Asian countries”. Many, he said, see Malaysia as a springboard for the UK.

“A lot of those students… are wanting to use Malaysia as a stepping stone to get into universities into the UK. So I think there’s a real opportunity there.”

Despite continued demand, the panel stressed that who can realistically afford a UK degree is narrowing.

Drawing on British Council analysis, Goh told delegates that in several Southeast Asian markets, the cost of UK study amounts to many times average household income, with Vietnam a particularly stark example. The result, she argued, is a fundamentally smaller pool of prospective students.

“UK study really is only for the affluent,” she said, adding that for scholarships or bursaries are often essential to tip the balance towards the UK.

“Once they have decided they can go overseas, actually, it’s about the quality and the long‑term career outcomes,” she explained. “The UK really competes on reputation rather than price.”

From the institutional side, Abhi Veerakumarasivam, provost and deputy vice-chancellor of Sunway University, cautioned that the long‑held assumption of automatic UK prestige no longer holds in the same way.

For many families, he argued, the question is not simply whether the UK has lost status, but how it compares in a crowded field of destinations that now includes regional competitors with strong offers on cost, access and post‑study opportunities. 

It’s no longer that coming to the UK alone is going to sell. The destination alone doesn’t sellAbhi Veerakumarasivam, Sunway University

“It’s no longer that coming to the UK alone is going to sell. The destination alone doesn’t sell,” he said, pointing to rapid improvements in Asian universities’ rankings and offerings.

In Malaysia, for example, students often intend to return home rather than stay abroad, and they judge the usefulness of a degree by how it builds skills, exposure to industry and pathways back into their domestic labour market – not whether it is branded as ‘global’ in abstract terms.

“Southeast Asian and East Asian students are not interested to stay in the UK long term,” added Goh. “For them, global employability is about the exposure whilst they are in the UK… and, more importantly, how you link them back to their home country.”

For UK recruiters, the most direct challenge came in Goh’s call for a “paradigm shift” in how they approach Southeast Asia.

“The era of the mega market is definitely over,” she said. “Success really depends on how you execute across many, many smaller markets. That means you need to put in a lot of efforts, but you get small quality leads… and it’s quality, but it’s not quantity.”

That means going beyond capital cities to tier‑2 and tier‑3 locations, often with only a handful of international schools, and working more collaboratively – for example through consortia – to open doors with local partners.