Publication type
Journal Article
Author
Publication date
July 16, 2026
Summary:
Existing empirical research shows that students benefit from, and often prefer to be taught by, instructors who share their demographic traits. However, it is unclear whether these patterns hold for students from an international background. Students who pursue higher education abroad might instead seek instructors from different backgrounds. Using data from three experiments across two student samples at leading research-intensive UK institutions, we provide the first causal evidence on international students’ preferences for instructor ethnicity and gender, and compare these with those of home students. We find that students prefer same-ethnicity instructors, but the effect is stronger for home students (0.17 standard deviations) than for international students (0.12 standard deviations). Home students also show modest same-gender preferences (0.05 standard deviations), whereas international students do not. Moreover, international students are less likely to choose same-ethnicity, same-gender instructors, suggesting that demographic similarity is not always preferred in cross-cultural settings. Finally, exploratory evidence indicates that preferences are shaped more by cultural cues than by ethnicity alone.
Published in
Oxford Review of Education
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2026.2696877
ISSN
14653915
Subjects
Notes
Online Early
© 2026 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Open Access
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
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