Mobility of Student Agency in Accessing International Higher Education: A Longitudinal Study of Chinese Students’ Overseas University Application Experiences

• In Event: Higher Education in East Asia: Gender, Agency, Research Collaboration and Assessment

Proposal

Purpose of Study

International student mobility (ISM) functions as a catalyst for academic excellence, cultural exchange, economic growth, and international understanding in an increasingly interconnected world (OECD, 2024). Echoing the global neoliberal agenda, ISM has seen substantial growth since 2010 (OECD, 2022). Recruiting international students has become a vital effort for host countries and universities (ICEF Monitor, 2025; BUILA, 2021). Education agents are widely used by both international students and universities in English-speaking and non-English-speaking host countries (Nikula, Raimo, & West, 2023). They provide a set of services, including counselling prospective international students and preparing application documents, as well as supporting institutions with marketing (BUILA, 2021). The competition for international recruitment and university applications is correspondingly intense, with education agents playing a key role for both overseas universities and prospective students (ANON 1; Nikula, Raimo, & West, 2023). However, recent global crises - including the COVID-19 pandemic, wars and environmental disasters - have severely impacted ISM and even reshaped the direction of ISM (Glass & Cruz, 2022). Against this backdrop, accessibility of international higher education (IHE) turns out to be particularly important in the currently divided world. Understanding how international students, particularly those who use education agents, apply for overseas programmes thus has made access to IHE an important focus in ISM research (e.g. ANON 2).

This paper focuses on Chinese students who use an education agent to apply for master’s or postgraduate taught programmes overseas (Chinese agent-user students), which serves to illustrate a typical university application experience of international students. We draw on a longitudinal study exploring the role of education agents in Chinese students’ overseas university application experiences from the perspective of both education agents and students, and aim to investigate in particular what (un)certainties Chinese agent-user students encounter in their overseas university applications, and how they navigate them. This paper adopts Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) chordal triad of agency for data analysis and interpretation, which foregrounds capturing and interpreting the agentic dimensions of social action within the flow of time and doing justice to their intrinsically dynamic, temporal and relational nature. This model distinguishes between three elements of agency, namely an iterational, practical-evaluative and projective element. They are oriented towards different temporal dimensions, precisely the past, present, and future, respectively. Thus, student agency in this paper refers to the agency of the student cohort applying to overseas universities – the ability of navigating themselves in accessing international higher education, wherein students responsively and reactively engage with overseas university application practices that best serve their application outcomes through the interplay of habit, imagination and judgement.

This paper suggests that many Chinese agent-user students, their parents and their networks lacked sufficient knowledge of international higher education. They were uncertain what they needed to know about it. Therefore, referencing the experience and precedents becomes important when considering studying abroad. Seeking a “good” education agent becomes crucial, involving a range of activities, such as students shopping around between different education agents. This generated space for reflexivity. This paper notes that some students planned and prepared early for studying abroad. This gave them more time and opportunities to learn the application norms and the education agent industry, reflectively consider what they had learned, which programme(s) they wanted to attend and how to achieve the goals, above all, experiment and adjust their strategies for applications. Furthermore, this paper highlights that students’ perception of “good” universities/programmes changed over the application process, generally from a ranking focus to an interest-based approach. “Continuous” applications enabled students to boost their admission rate, but also to become highly reactive and responsive towards applications.

Research method

This paper emanated from a sequentially designed project that explored the experiences of Chinese agent-user students’ university applications from the perspectives of both education agents and Chinese agent-user students. This project consists of two studies. Study 1 investigated how education agents reflected on Chinese agent-user students’ university applications (ANON 3). This study was conducted in May 2020 using semi-structured interviews with 16 education agent consultants. They comprise 13 communicators and 3 processors, representing 16 different education agencies across ten cities in China. Thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) was used to analyse the data. On this basis, Study 2, a longitudinal study (ANON 4), examined Chinese agent-user students’ reflections on university application experiences and the role of education agents in this process. The study recruited 10 agent-user students who applied for overseas master’s programmes starting in autumn 2021 for four rounds of semi-structured interviews and a member-checking interview from November 2020 to June 2022. The timelines echoed the four key stages of applications identified from Study 1, namely submitting applications, tracking applications, receiving application results, and making a final choice. Each interview was conducted in Chinese and audio-recorded, taking around two hours. Study 2 applied the six-step interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) approach (Smith et al., 2009) for data generation and analysis. It started the data analysis after each interview, reinforcing the researcher’s familiarity with interview data, documenting the details in time, reflecting on interactions throughout interviews, and developing subsequent interview questions. It is important to note that a set of interview questions was raised in both Studies 1 & 2. They focus on:

- To reflect on the role of both education agents and students in overseas university applications
- To reflect on the admission criteria of overseas programmes
- To reflect on the student's expectations of university applications
- To reflect on the relationship between education agents and students

On this basis, the researcher teased out the related accounts corresponding to the above focuses from Studies 1 and 2, respectively. A range of frequently mentioned terms was identified. They are timelines of applications, professions of education agents, university rankings, early preparations, choices of education agents, development of application documents, perceptions of applicants and so forth. The researcher clustered the accounts from both student participants and education agent participants according to the themes and compared and contrasted their reflections.

Author

• Ying Yang, The Education University of Hong Kong