If we are to understand the future of global higher education, we must begin to study first generation "international" students who embody the future of student global mobility. Traditional paradigms of global student mobility narrowly focus on a small subset of the global student population (de Wit & Jones, 2017). However, first-generation students are the growing edge of university enrollments worldwide (Schulmann & Le, 2018; World Bank, 2018), and their future depends on ensuring that access to higher education translates to economic opportunity and social mobility (Glass, Gesing, Hales, & Cong, 2017). The livelihoods of the next generation of students are being shaped by rapid urbanization, automation of the global workforce, and the rise of economic and political nationalism in traditional host countries (Choudaha & van Rest, 2018). The coming wave of global student mobility will be shaped by what we term the 4Ds: new demographics, new drivers, new directions, and new forms of delivery. We briefly describe how each of these dimensions, including findings from our analysis of the National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG, 2015) to illustrate these trends, particularly as they relate to access and equity for first generation international students.