Previous studies on the field of education abroad have mainly focused on the factors influencing the mobility of international students from developing to developed countries and very few have been conducted to investigate the factors influencing the flow of international students to the Asia Pacific region. As a piece of country-specific research, this study, with an attempt to explore why and how international students travel to Taiwan for the purpose of study and to describe possible implications for the authorities and institutions offering higher education, is timely and worthwhile. A push–pull model is developed to identify the factors relating to the three-phase model of study abroad decision-making process, while the analytic hierarchy process method is used to examine the relative importance of these factors. The findings of this study suggest that policy makers and institutional administrators should focus on offering various kinds of scholarships for international students, designing multilingual websites for international students with different languages, promoting language training programs for international students, and designing student recruitment strategies tailored for the different study groups of international students at the government and the institution levels. This study is of particular significance because global competition between countries for international students and especially for the best among them will be more intense in the future.