Indebted Mobilities: Indian Youth, Migration, and the Internationalizing University

An ethnographic rendering of overseas students' fraught encounters studying at an American public university.

As states have reduced funding to public universities, many of those institutions have turned to overseas students as a vital, alternative source of revenue. Students from India have especially been seen as among the most desirable populations, as they’re typically fluent in English and overwhelmingly enroll in professional fields deemed critical to the knowledge economy. The large...