Top 10 Places to Study Abroad 2023

At educations.com, our mission is to help everyone in the world find the right education. We know that international students have special considerations when choosing an ideal university and program, and our Top 10 Places to Study Abroad rankings are a major step towards helping them find their ideal study abroad destination!

In 2022, we conducted a survey of over 20,000 students from around the world and asked about their top reasons for studying abroad. This resulted in the list of factors they considered most important which was then used as the framework for our rankings.

This is the fifth ranking of this kind, and to compare how the importance of the seven factors has changed since last year, check the 2022 rankings and rationale page.

These seven factors are:

High-quality teaching
Achieving career goals
Personal development
Culture and lifestyle
Opportunities to network or make new friends
Language learning
Adventure

We then assigned the factors their corresponding quantitative metric (or weight) according to how many students selected that factor as important in their decision-making process. For example, 17.25% of students surveyed said it was important to experience a new culture or lifestyle. Hence, the 'to experience a new culture or lifestyle' factor makes up 17.25% of each country's overall score.

Each factor's score is made up of sub-scores based on a selection of external data sources (listed below). Each of these sub-scores was averaged out and added together to create a final score for that factor.

From there, the factors were weighted and added together to create a final score for each country. The top 10 places for each list are the countries with the highest final score.