Educational pathfinders? Understanding Western-situated international students’ motivation to study in China

• In Event: Publication mentoring workshop session
  In Special Session: International & Intercultural Education - Group B

Proposal

Towards the end of the Outline of China’s National Plan for Medium and Long-term Education Reform and Development (2010-2020), the higher education sector’s ‘opening-up’ policy led to an exponential increase in the number of inbound international students to China, with a 40% increase between 2010 and 2014, for the purpose of attending both degree and non-degree programs. More importantly, the recent statistics from China’s Ministry of Education highlights a growing enrolment in degree programme, representing a 15% increase from 2016 to 2017. According to the British Council (2015), China will continue to compete with the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia as one of the world’s leading destinations for globally mobile students. Indeed, China is the only non-English speaking, non-Western European country among the world’s top popular study abroad destinations.

Despite China’s rapidly changing role in the landscape of international higher education, China is still unequally represented in the extant literature. Research on International Student Mobility (ISM) to date has predominantly been concerned with movements from East Asia to the major destination countries, particularly English-speaking nations. Such mobility is often associated with pursuit of English and Western education (Brooks & Waters, 2011). In contrast, educational migration from countries with already highly sought-after advantages to a newly emerging destination, such as China, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Consequently, there has been a marked geographical imbalance in the current literature on ISM, which primarily defines Asian countries as a source of international students rather than a destination for such students. Correspondingly, Western situated international students’ motivations for, and experiences of, study abroad have often been overlooked in the literature (Prazeres, 2017). Such imbalance in the literature makes it difficult to present a clear argument for the relative value of international higher education and its links with subsequent employment and/or mobility (Waters, 2012).

Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 33 North American and European undergraduate students at an US university’s branch campus in China, this study documents their explicit claims itself as well as nuanced account of stories on their educational choices. I further complement participants’ oral narrative accounts with ethnographic observations of participants’, and critical discourse analysis of universities’ public social media accounts. Theoretically, the paper draws on and modifies Bourdieu’s concepts of forms of capital and Foucault’s concepts of subjectivity. I posit that Bourdieu’s theories can elucidate important aspects of international students’ layers of choices and analyse critically the field and agents within it. Where I recognised the limits of concepts drawn from Bourdieu in explaining international students’ motivations and outputs, I complimented his theory with other relevant social theories, such as Michael Foucault’s concept of subjectivity.
I deeply dig into underlying aspects of the motivation, which may be unique to the transnational undergraduate students from the West to China. By positioning the participants’ and institutions’ narrative accounts within the powerful discourse of neo-liberal globalization and the internationalisation of higher education, this study demonstrates how these globally mobile students reinforce and/or undermine some of the taken-for-granted assumptions and dominant representations of international students in existing literature.

Findings point out, although the Western-situated international students in this study may not adhere to the stereotype of ‘international students’, they tended to make sense of their motivations based on the notions of sameness and difference. While many students reported that the decision to study in China was non-strategic and a somewhat impulsive decision, the analysis shows that there is a single dominant image of the bona fide cosmopolitan, which these study participants tried to ‘become’ through mobility. Additionally, Phases describing ‘daring’ decision to study in an ‘unconventional’ destination was repeatedly used, suggesting that ‘frontier/pathfinder’ was a quality that participant sought from the beginning, and later underlined what they have achieved in China.

I argue reflection on this under-researched internationally mobile youth may provide potential value to other contexts. In academic terms, this study provides an excellent opportunity to generate new insight into relatively unorthodox, yet rising student population flows, which have much in common with migration trends in the global labour market. Furthermore, results of this research not only carry implications for educational migration flows to China, but also serve as a mirror reflecting the ultimate issue of brain drain, brain gain and brain circulation by suggesting a perspective on how the credentials from international higher education are valued differently in different social contexts and geographical locations.

[I am currently completing my DPhil with an expected degree date of August 2019. This paper is part of my larger doctoral research.]

Author

• Kris Hyesoo Lee, University of Oxford