Social Selectivity in Study Abroad from a Comparative Perspective: Impact of National Internationalization Strategies in Germany, Japan and the United States

• In Event: Education Abroad Impact on Learning

Proposal

As a consequence of the vast international educational expansion at the higher education levels, competition for the relatively scarcer coveted positions on the globalizing labor market intensified among highly educated individuals in many highly industrialized societies. For example, nowadays the vast majority of students in the leading industrialized societies Germany, Japan and the United States enrol in universities to achieve tertiary education degrees. Under these circumstances, families with advantaged socioeconomic status (SES), i.e. where parents are highly educated and/or have high income, not only invest in achieving a high level of education (e.g., university degree) to maintain their children’s status advantage, but also increasingly focus their efforts on horizontal differences in educational attainment, i.e. universities or programs that promise higher returns (Lucas, 2001). In this regard, the gradual transformation and institutionalization of ‘transnational human capital’ (THC) as a new form of valued cultural capital provides an opportunity for affluent families to pursue additional status-setting investment (Entrich & Byun, 2021; Entrich & Fujihara, 2022; Netz & Finger, 2016).
Studying abroad is considered one of the most efficient ways to acquire THC in the form of foreign language proficiency and intercultural skills, which are believed to significantly enhance individuals’ career prospectives (Di Pietro, 2021). However, past international research indicates that the potential benefits of studying abroad are primarily reaped by advantaged strata, which implies that study abroad tends to foster the reproduction of social inequality (Netz et al., 2020). Unfortunately, comparative studies remain the exception, wherefore we do not know much about the outcomes of different strategies to enhance international student mobility while at the same time reducing inequality in access to mobility programs. To narrow this research gap, we draw on national representative data for three major industrial societies of very different geographical region and where very different national strategies to foster international student mobility are pursued, e.g. “ERASMUS+” in Germany, the “Japan Revitalization Strategy” in Japan, and the “AAC&U’s LEAP Initiative” in the US.
Theoretically, we follow up on the extended rational choice framework of Lörz et al. (2016), which combines elements of rational choice theory and life course perspectives, and further extend this individual choice model with insights from context effect theories (Becker & Schulze, 2013). Hence, we contest the common practice of explaining study abroad participation entirely with individual characteristics and instead stress the importance to take into account contextual factors that frame the decision for study abroad. National higher education systems create specific contexts that influence the individual mobility behavior of students through the transmission of institutional knowledge and by creating opportunities to go abroad (exchange agreements, scholarships, etc.). Yet, research on the outcomes of such efforts for inequality in study abroad uptake is sparse. According to the cultural mobility model, active participation in studying abroad as a form of prestigious cultural capital “may be a useful strategy for low status students who aspire towards upward mobility” (DiMaggio, 1982, p. 190), because the returns to this investment can be relatively higher for low SES students than higher SES students (Di Pietro, 2015; Sorrenti, 2017). Hence, low SES students are likely to have an extra incentive to invest in study abroad to offset their disadvantages. We hypothesize that the socioeconomic gap in studying abroad is narrower in societies where the national higher education system provides larger and non-selective funds for international student mobility, thus enabling disadvantaged students across all universities to access study abroad programs more easily.
Findings from multilevel logistic regressions indicate that the socioeconomic gap is lowest in Germany, but that differences in the distribution of national resources to universities results in great variety in social selectivity in study abroad across universities in the United States and Japan. Results are expected to inform education policy and contribute to our understanding of recent developments in the linkage between inequality in study abroad and the effectivity of national education strategies to foster transnational human capital.

References
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Entrich, S. R., & Fujihara, S. (2022). New horizontal inequalities in Japanese education? Examining socioeconomic selectivity in pre-college study abroad intent and participation. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 81, 100727. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rssm.2022.100727
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Author

• Steve Richard Entrich, Universität Potsdam