My research explores how British students, with different imaginaries of their ‘place’ in the world (socially and spatially), navigate increasingly globally-integrated fields of higher education. It foregrounds the experiences of British young people across two starkly different research sites: an elite international school in Singapore, South East Asia; and a state school in Rotherham, a deindustrialised town in northern England. Using participatory cognitive mapping methods and semi-structured interviews, I argue that youth transitions to higher education are mediated by powerful socio-spatial geometries structuring higher education, and that young people are positioned inequitably in relation to changing power structures shaped by the globalisation and internationalisation of higher education.