Wales attracts international students from 106 countries, enrolling students onto 5,300 different courses. In the last two years Welsh Higher Education institutions have launched over 100 new courses and attracted over 900m of research funding. This year international students enrolling on courses increased to over 10,000 students with an average of 10% of the student population made up of students from countries outside the EU. There are currently almost 2,000 students from India studying a wide variety of courses including Business & Management, Computer Science, Creative Industries, Engineering & Technology, Law, Medicine and Psychology.

Wales has over 60 centres of research excellence, expertise and specialisation including:

• Biosciences and Environment Alliance
• Centre for Advanced Software and Intelligent Systems
• Environment Centre for Wales
• Institute of Advanced Telecommunications
• Institute of Life Sciences
• Skillset Screen Academy Wales
• Wales Gene Park
• Welsh Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
• Wales Institute of Mathematical and Computational Science
• Research and Enterprise Partnership.

In the RAE 2008 14% of all research activity submitted by Welsh institutions was judged to be ‘world leading’, with a further 35% assessed as ‘internationally excellent’.

Wales is set to prove its commitment to internationalisation within its higher education strategy and to international students by huge increases in the range of scholarships, bursaries and awards available to international students. Several universities in Wales have launched new scholarships for 2009-2010 or increased existing provision meaning that over £17,000,000 worth of scholarships are available in Wales for 2009-2010. Wales International Consortium is also currently in talks with several potential partners to increase the scholarship provision even further anticipating  that this amount is set to increase again by 2010 – 2011.