In this article, we analyze international students’ perceptions of their needs when going abroad. The trend toward internationalization and the increase in mobility drives the agenda for globalization in many higher education institutions, and in some cases without any clear strategy for identifying the possible needs of international students. Are universities aware of the international students’ perceptions and needs? The purpose of this article is to reflect on the different needs that international students have when visiting new countries, and what particular services they require. Little research exists on this aspect of student mobility. We offer a new approach to it by using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a probabilistic topic model that has been used to analyze 59,662 student opinions and to group them into categories. To ensure a holistic approach and reliable visualization of the data, we also use a network analysis tool that allows us to collect together students’ perceptions and needs in a distilled format.
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