Will Western students move to universities in emerging countries ?

I’m trying to build an argument for the thought that the trend toward geographic mobility will increase with the upcoming Generation Y.

The most obvious argument is that young people will likely move to where the action is, read: where the economic growth is… In the future they even might have more favorable working conditions there –a better salary or more chances to get promoted. Some that have moved probably obtained higher salaries already.

But in the future young Western people might move to ‘developing’ countries for better education offerings as well. This is debatable, so I went looking for some hard facts. There are a couple of lists of top universities globally. Let’s take 3 of them and see how many are located in emerging markets:

(the numbers refer to the ranks on the lists, Hong Kong not included)

So in average about 5% of the top 200 universities are from ‘emerging’ countries (7% if you include Hong Kong). Not too bad, but it gets more interesting if you look at the ‘popularity’ of the universities. A list built by 4icu uses some algorithm to gauge the popularity of the internet websites of the universities globally. This list suddenly looks very different

(in order of first appearance in the list, excluding Hong Kong):

Surely this list is biased, since it’s partially based on number of visits to the websites of these universities.

Still the question is intriguing: could the list of best universities look like this ten year from now? And will these increasingly attract Western students, worsening the talent shortage in the West?