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 expanding overseas student enrollments 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 numbers of these youth migrating for their education tend to be viewed as a shining example of the value of the contemporary global university and how it enables ambitious people to secure opportunities not available to them in their home country.

Yet a deeper examination of these young people's encounters reveals a more complicated story than glossy brochures and paeans to American higher education would suggest. Indebted Mobilities draws on Susan Thomas's close shadowing of a group of middle-class Indian migrant men who attended a public university in New York just as the institution sought to "internationalize" its campus in the wake of state withdrawal of funding support. Thomas takes the reader along with the young men as they study, work, and socialize, pursuing the successful futures they believed to be promised when they migrated for an American education. All the while, she shows, they must face their marginalization as they become enmeshed in the fraught inclusion politics of contemporary university life in the United States. At the heart of these encounters is these students' relationship to debt-not just material ones that include student loans, but moral and emotional debts as well. This indebtedness, which keeps them tied to both India and the United States, becomes meaningful to how Indian middle-class youth make sense of their experiences as student-migrants. Thomas illuminates how the complex realities that arise for these men force a reckoning with their anxieties about successful masculinities and the precarity of being drawn into the global knowledge economy as indebted migrants.