For a better understanding of the impact of global student flows on industries and knowledge societies, we need to rethink the relationship between global student mobility and migrant knowledge. The authors elaborate on the view that current policy and practice relating to higher education mobility puts too much emphasis on mobilizing pools of knowledge, thereby ignoring the fact that knowledge flows tend to be concentrated among people who are actively participating in the knowledge flow. Adopting a shared social context perspective on the dynamics of knowledge flow embedded in mobile minds may enable a better assessment to be made of the impact of student mobility over time on industries and societies. Given such an assessment, policy and practice measures can be developed to encourage those involved in the knowledge flow to exploit student talent flow more effectively.