India's Gen Z Is Cooling on the Study-Abroad Dream

For a generation raised on the promise that a foreign degree unlocks the world, the Study-Abroad Dream is losing some of its shine in India. Nearly half of young Indians who say they would consider studying overseas now report that their interest has faded over the past year, according to a new survey from education company Emeritus, reported by The PIE News. The reasons are stubbornly practical: rising costs, tightening visa regimes, and growing doubts about safety abroad.

The findings land at a moment when the global education market is being reshaped in real time. Western universities have spent the past decade courting Indian students as their fastest-growing source of international enrolments. Now the students are doing the courting calculus back — and a large share are deciding the math no longer works.

The numbers behind the rethink

Emeritus’s India Gen Z Outlook survey, conducted in March among 1,010 Indians aged fifteen to twenty-eight across more than fifty cities, found that seventy-one percent of respondents were interested in overseas study. But forty-eight percent of that interested group said their enthusiasm had declined compared with a year earlier. Among those cooling on the idea, thirty-seven percent pointed to rising costs, twenty-six percent cited visa and immigration policies, and twenty-four percent flagged safety and political uncertainty in destination countries.

What has not changed is why students wanted to go in the first place. The motivations remain career-first: forty percent named higher earning potential and thirty-nine percent named better job opportunities, followed by higher-quality teaching and stronger professional networks. The dream itself is intact. It is the price of admission — literal and otherwise — that has become the problem.

Ashwin Damera, the co-founder and chief executive of Emeritus, told the education outlet that students are reconsidering destinations, delaying plans, or reassessing overseas study altogether, with different patterns across life stages. “They are citing rising visa uncertainties, geopolitical turbulence, and costs that are significantly impacting their choices,” he said. For early-career respondents, he added, the decision has become a timing question: “They are already in the workforce and more likely to consider overseas study as a deliberate, planned future investment rather than an immediate choice.”

The India option is winning converts

Here is the twist the survey’s sponsors did not have to look far to find. Sixty-eight percent of all respondents said they would be likely or extremely likely to pursue a program offered in India by an international university. Among pre-college respondents, eighty-seven percent expressed interest in studying domestically within two years; among those transitioning between undergraduate and postgraduate study, the figure was ninety-two percent. Hybrid programs — study in India with time abroad — appealed to thirty-nine percent of the transitioning group and twenty-seven percent of pre-college students.

The financial logic is easy to see. Research by Rahul Choudaha of DrEducation, published in August, put average annual tuition at international branch campuses in India at roughly thirteen lakh rupees for undergraduate programs and about seventeen lakh for postgraduate ones — around one hundred fifteen percent more than leading Indian private universities, but only about a third of the fees at the same institutions’ overseas parent campuses, before scholarships. And that comparison excludes the biggest costs of going abroad entirely. “A student going abroad is not just paying tuition, they are paying for visa fees, travel, accommodation, and years of living costs in a foreign country,” Damera said.

Early employment signals are mixed but encouraging. Deakin University reported in March that around half to three-fifths of its GIFT City students had secured jobs, with others completing internships. A separate survey covered by the outlet in May found that more than seventy percent of employers prioritised workplace readiness over institutional reputation — a finding that cuts both ways for branch campuses selling a famous name. Among schools surveyed, nearly half said it was too early to confidently recommend the international branch campuses, a reminder that the model still has to prove itself where it counts: after graduation.

What it means for students weighing the choice

For the students themselves, the survey sketches a more deliberate generation than the stereotype of the prestige-chasing applicant. Many are not abandoning ambition; they are repricing it. Damera pointed to corporate partnerships, industry-adjacent campus locations, and career services as the things that will decide whether the India-based international programs earn lasting trust — alongside, in his framing, three forms of capital students are really buying: “Intellectual capital: who is teaching you and what is the quality of what you are being taught. Brand capital: when you walk into a room of recruiters, does the name behind your degree speak before you do. And social capital: the peer network you build alongside people who will go on to lead, build, and create.”

There is also a counterpoint worth sitting with. A separate mobility survey from Oxford International, reported earlier this year, found that eighty-one percent of study-abroad aspirants intended to return to India after their courses. The pull of home was never really in doubt; the question is whether students need to leave to get what they want. “These campuses are not serving only students who were always going to stay, they are drawing in a broader audience than that,” Damera said.

Access remains the open question. Damera said his company is working with the Maharashtra chief minister’s office and the University of Bristol to offer full scholarships to selected students from rural government schools in the state. “They will not lower their standards, but they also understand that cost should not become a barrier to talent.” Whether that promise scales will decide if the Study-Abroad Dream is truly being reimagined — or simply repriced out of reach and sold back at a discount. For now, India’s Gen Z is doing what the data says it does best: running the numbers before signing anything. Readers tracking how young workers are thinking about their next move can also see the Gen Z job search wave building as pay tops wish lists and why job hopping has become a career strategy rather than disloyalty.