Global education has become a big business, as evidenced in the exhibit hall at the annual conference of Nafsa: Association of International Educators, where hundreds of vendors pitch a wide range of products and services. The world has become a kind of global classroom, with greater numbers of students flowing across borders each year. The number of students who study outside their home countries is projected to grow from three million this year to eight million by 2025. Both colleges and governments have become more aggressive about tapping into that market, resulting in a big increase in recruiting services, image advertising, and data-driven market research. American students have come to expect that their colleges will offer them a range of international experiences. However, many colleges lack the capability, the capacity, and, often, the cash to undertake such efforts on their own. That is where outside vendors, both for-profit and nonprofit, come in. "International education is a sector that combines the ideals and ethics of higher education with the imperatives of an intensely competitive business environment," says Markus Badde, chief executive of ICEF, an international-education consulting and training company. The rapid growth of international education, and the companies it has spawned, has brought new scrutiny to the industry. The 2007 study-abroad investigation by Andrew M. Cuomo, New York's attorney general, in which more than two dozen colleges and independent providers were issued subpoenas, helped accelerate a movement toward professionalization. As a result, colleges are likelier than before to take a close look at the business arrangements they make with study-abroad providers and others.