Roughly 9,800 Georgian students are studying abroad right now. That figure comes from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, and at first glance it is encouraging: the number has grown steadily, from about 7,200 a decade ago, and Georgia’s outbound mobility ratio — the share of its students who study outside the country — stands at 6.5 percent, well above the global average. Georgians go abroad to learn. That has never been the problem.
Look one layer deeper, and the picture changes. The most popular destinations for Georgian students are Germany, France, Greece, and the Czech Republic, alongside universities across the immediate region. These are good institutions in good systems — and almost none of this mobility reaches the places where the frontier of science and technology is actually being set: the top-ranked laboratories of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland.
The statistic that does not exist
Here is the most telling fact we found while researching this essay: there is no reliable count of how many Georgians study at the world’s leading universities. India’s presence in American higher education is measured to the individual — over 360,000 students in a single academic year. China’s is a quarter of a million. Georgia does not appear in these ledgers as a line of its own, because the number is too small to be a statistic. When your country’s presence at the top of world education is a rounding error, no one writes it down.
When your country’s presence at the top is a rounding error, no one writes it down. We intend to change what gets written.
Let us be careful about what this does not mean. It does not mean Georgian students lack ability — every year, some are admitted to the world’s most demanding programmes, which is proof enough of the raw material. It does not mean nothing is being done: Georgia’s own International Education Centre has funded hundreds of students abroad since 2014, and Erasmus+ has made Georgia one of its most active partner countries. The pipes exist. What the numbers show is where the pipes lead — and how rarely they lead to the very top.
Why the top matters
It is fair to ask whether the top tier matters this much. We believe it does, for a reason that has nothing to do with prestige. More than half of all international students in the United States now study STEM — because that is where the laboratories are, and laboratories are where fields are made. A Master’s at a frontier institution is not a nicer version of the same degree; it is admission to the rooms where the next decade of a discipline is being decided. Countries that have people in those rooms shape technology. Countries that do not, import it.
Room for improvement is the optimistic phrase
The honest phrase is: an open goal. Georgia already produces the students. They are already mobile. What stands between a brilliant Georgian graduate and ETH Zürich or MIT is almost never admission — it is the cost of one to two years of study, at the exact moment in life when almost no one can afford it and almost no one else will fund it.
That is a solvable problem. It is, in fact, the precise problem this foundation was built to solve — one scholar at a time, at the standard the top of the world demands. The numbers above describe where Georgia is. The foundation’s ledger, as it grows, will describe where Georgia is going.
Sources: UNESCO Institute for Statistics (outbound mobility, Georgia); IIE Open Doors 2025 (international students in the United States); DAAD/Study in Europe country data for Georgia.
