Segmented Credential Pathways: Diverging International Higher Education Choices Among Global Middle-Class

• In Event: 21020 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 13: Equity, Engagement, and Global Perspectives in the Evolving Learning Landscape

Abstract

The global middle-class’s accelerating pursuit of international higher education unfolds against a paradoxical structural tension marked by the simultaneous expansion of transnational student mobility and the destabilization of traditional credentialing systems through intensified competition (crisis of acquisition) and depreciating labor market returns (crisis of devaluation). While existing scholarship prioritizes elite gatekeeping and working-class exclusion, this study addresses the critical gap in understanding global educational stratification by examining how South Korean middle-class students strategically navigate constrained resources and aspirational mobility—a phenomenon theorized as segmented credential pathway. Drawing on 44 in-depth interviews with undergraduates at a Midwestern U.S. university and elite Korean institutions, the analysis demonstrates how diverging pathways emerge from initial socioeconomic stratification: affluent students perpetuate elite Anglo-American credential hierarchies through family-mediated social capital, whereas lower-middle-class cohorts pursue cost-sensitive alternatives in semi-peripheral hubs like Hong Kong amid informational asymmetries. These trajectories crystallize into durable inequality through a tripartite mechanism—beginning with classed preparation (differential access to cultural/financial resources), progressing through networked divergence (privileged students’ integration into cosmopolitan professional circuits versus constrained peers’ reliance on conational enclaves), and culminating in transnational labor sorting (host-society retention of networked elites versus peripheralized returnees reinforcing core-periphery hierarchies). The findings reconceptualize international education as a transnational class formation apparatus that, despite meritocratic rhetoric, reproduces spatial and cognitive peripherality through segmented credential pathways. This necessitates policy interventions targeting structural barriers—particularly informational asymmetries and network gatekeeping—that transmute educational mobility promises into engines of class stratification, urging institutional reforms to mitigate the reproduction of entrenched inequalities.

Author

• HongJin Jo, University of Chicago