Theoretical Perspectives on Inbound International Students: A Systematic Review of Literature in the Past Decade

• In Event: New Insights in Education

Abstract

Research on inbound international students has exploded in the last decade, but there is limited recognition of how theoretical constructs guide the evolving field. To better understand the academic changes in the study of transnational student mobility, our research charts theoretical constructs that ground the research, re-imagines how theories influence the field, and how theories might challenge the universality of scholarship. To gather a comprehensive review of the field, we purposefully selected 143 peer-reviewed articles published between 2009 and 2019 on 17 higher education journals. We first summarize characteristics of the articles, including countries of authors’ institution, sending and receiving countries, level of study, and keywords. We then categorized the different theories into four narratives: humanitarianism, neo-liberalism, post-modernism, and post-colonialism.

Authors

• Rosalind Latiner Raby, California State University

• Yi Leaf Zhang, University of Texas at Arlington