Dilemmas of Studying Abroad for Chinese Students in Graduate Programs at Universities of the United States

• In Event: Constructing identities through studying abroad

Proposal

Studying abroad at U.S. graduate schools has been a trend since the 1990s, and more than 3.5 billion Chinese students are studying in the United States today, 36.6% of them are graduate students. In fact, in the 1950s till 1970s, China sent no students to study abroad (Institute of International Education, 2017). Scholars have not provided a comprehensive scrutiny about the various historical reasons that can explain this number burgeoning. Nowadays, many Chinese students and the Chinese government expect that studying abroad in the United States will educate Chinese students with various skills and competencies (e.g. gaining skills and/or citizenships), which will then benefit individuals and the nation (Desjardins, 2003, p.11). However, few data have been collected to reflect how and to what extent have their economic and cultural expectations been reached. Moreover, the seeming significances of studying abroad -- to cultivate one’s skills and competencies -- may turn out to produce complex results that may not align with the expectations. For the Chinese government, the expectation of cultivating excellent intellectuals by studying abroad ends up to bringing back critical scholars pointing the nose of the nation’s political system. For Chinese students, they find themselves in an ideological controversy after learning and experiencing so many of new ideologies in the U.S. They also meet a dilemma of how to apply their new skills and thoughts that they learned from the U.S. to their working and living environment when they go back to China.

Although several studies have studied the experiences, expectations, and outcomes of studying abroad for Chinese students from China generally, few have focused on the Chinese students who are studying graduate programs in U.S. universities – a unique group of Chinese students who come to the U.S. after all their K-12 and undergraduate (approximately 17 years in total) in China. Compared with the general Chinese students studying abroad at the U.S., they are distinctive with their experience in the nation’s largest (and severely determinative) examination -- the College Entrance Examination, and are heavily influenced by the Chinese educational system. For this reason, they may face particular challenges to adapt to the new education system. For example, although Chinese education equips them with unique competencies, such as academic competitiveness, hard-working, and high-motivation, they are poor in many of other competencies like critical thinking, democratic thinking, and self-efficacy. This skill mismatch may have posed great hardships for Chinese graduate students to transition into and succeed in a new education system at universities in the U.S.

With the problem above, this study focuses on the experiences, expectations, and outcomes of the Chinese students who come to the U.S. for graduate studies, with the following questions:
1. What explains the burgeoning number of Chinese students studying graduate programs in the United States?
2. To what extent do the expectations of studying abroad at the U.S. come true for Chinese graduate students and the Chinese government?
3. What are the challenges and dilemmas for Chinese graduate students to study at the U.S. in terms of skill mismatch and ideological controversy?


This study reviews historical document about the Chinese government policies and historical conditions of China in the 1950s through the 1990s to reveal the historical background for Chinese students to study abroad at the U.S. This study also interviews 30 Chinese graduate students near their graduation and 30 new Chinese graduate students at U.S. universities to investigate the expectation-outcome relationship, their experiences in studying abroad, and specifically the challenges of ideology controversy and skill mismatch. Moreover, to examine the contextual-sensitive concept of skill and competency development, this study compares Chinese students’ skill and competencies with students from other educational backgrounds. This study also compares Chinese students at the different stage of studying abroad (incoming students, the 1st year studying abroad, the 2nd year studying abroad, the 3rd year studying abroad, etc.) to investigate how their skills and competencies change over time and their reflections on these changes.

This study offers a historical perspective on understanding the development of studying abroad activities between China and the U.S. It also provides a contextual understanding of skills and competencies development, with analysis on how cross-cultural experiences (re)shaping Chinese graduate students’ skill and competencies and how cross-cultural learning experiences actually produce far more complex outcomes than expected.

Author

• Linli Zhou, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)