Supervising international students: The role of symbolic capital

• In Event: Inclusive for Whom? (In)equality and Student Educational Opportunities

Proposal

The number of internationally mobile students has grown exponentially over the past decades (Glass and Cruz 2023). Mobility tends to increase at more advanced levels of education; across the OECD, international students account for 24% of enrollment in doctoral programs, with some countries, such as the UK and the US, having significantly higher proportions (Gao 2021). The mobility of international research students (IRS), those who conduct research at the postgraduate level, is portrayed as driven by a range of mutually overlapping academic, economic, political, and socio-cultural rationales: students pursue international research opportunities for advanced training, better employment prospects, self-formation, cosmopolitan capital, and prestige (Zhou 2015). Institutions view these students as key contributors to knowledge production, global rankings, reputation, and tuition revenue (Woldegiyorgis, Proctor, and de Wit 2018). States regard IRS as essential for enhancing their research infrastructure, encouragingskilled migration, and advancing soft power (Baas 2019; de Wit and Deca 2020; Eskelä2013). Consequently, institutions and states are increasingly implementing policies and recruitment campaigns to attract international students (Hong and Hardy 2024; Lomer, Papatsiba, and Naidoo 2018; Wilkins and Huisman 2025).

Despite extensive research on the motivations behind IRS mobility from national, institutional, and student perspectives, relatively little attention has been given to the perceptions and roles of academic staff – those who directly supervise these students and play a crucial role in shaping their academic trajectories. This gap is particularly surprising given that research students generally require a supervisor to complete their studies (e.g. Sinclair, Barnacle, and Cuthbert 2014; Williamson and Cable 2003). Moreover, in many leading destinations for IRS, academic freedom norms grant academic staff considerable autonomy in selecting whom they supervise, making them key decision makers in the mobility process (de Wit and Altbach 2021). Given this discretionary power, academic staff perceptions of international student supervision are likely to influence the patterns and experiences of IRS mobility – yet this dimension remains underexplored.

At the same time, supervision does not occur in isolation but is shaped by broader structural conditions. A considerable body of research has analyzed how increasing competition in academia and shifting reward structures have reshaped academic staff roles, career conditions, and academic priorities (e.g. Macfarlane 2020; Weinreb and Yemini2023). Mechanisms such as performance-based funding and publication-driven evaluation systems have altered academic staff perceptions of supervision, shifting its focus from mentorship to research productivity. Müller (2014) highlights how heightened performativity in European higher education has led to doctoral students being increasingly seen as research assets rather than mentees, reinforcing a ‘logic of production’ that prioritizes academic staff members’ own career advancement (see also Torka 2018, on the ‘projectification’ of doctoral studies). These shifts reflect broader transformations in academic citizenship, where academic staff strategically engage in supervision to maximize their symbolic capital – prestige, scholarly publications, competitive grants, professional networks, and affiliations with esteemed institutions. Within this evolving academic landscape, international students occupy a particularly precarious position. They often face marginalization due to linguistic, cultural, and systemic barriers, as well as more precarious legal and financial standing within host institutions (Deuchar 2023), which may further shape supervisors’ perceptions and willingness to engage. While substantial research has examined best practices for supervising international students (e.g. Gao 2021; McKinley 2019; Russell-Pinson and Harris 2019) and international students’ perspectives on supervision (e.g. Gao 2019; Wang and Byram 2019), there is limited research on how academic staff themselves perceive and engage with international student supervision within this increasingly competitive and performative academic environment.

Drawing on Bourdieu’s conceptual tools and based on 60 semi-structured interviews with academic staff from four Israeli research universities, this study explores supervisors’ perceptions of and engagement with IRS. Israel provides a compelling context for this inquiry due to its high research productivity, significant international research collaborations, and highly metricized performance-based funding system that values grants and publications (Mizrahi-Shtelman and Drori 2021). We identify three perceptions discouraging supervision: IRS were viewed as less capable, reflecting global academic hierarchies (Van Mol et al., 2021); students from less familiar systems (i.e. Global South) were considered ‘riskier’; and some faculty expressed patriotic preferences for local candidates. Conversely, three perceptions encouraged supervision: IRS as substitutes for scarce local talent (particularly in the life sciences); as sources of special expertise that enhance supervisors’ prestige; and as contributors to international standing through exchanges. Engagement strategies reflected these logics and three emerged: avoidance (opting out when supervision brought little symbolic gain); leveraging networks to recruit vetted students; and specializing in recruiting from a single country to mitigate risk.
This study shows that academic staff primarily view the supervision of international students through the lens of accruing symbolic capital within their academic fields, viewing these relationships as tools to enhance their research standing and global academic influence. Academic staff actively seek out IRS when it aligns with their research needs or offers clear advantages but may opt out when they perceive supervision as unnecessary for their advancement or too risky. The findings also highlight the importance of discipline in shaping academic staff perceptions and engagement strategies.

Institutions should move beyond policy rhetoric and address the factors that shape academic staff perceptions and engagement. Improving systems for assessing international credentials—particularly for candidates from the Global South—could help counter prestige-based bias. Enhanced support for IRS, promotion of positive supervision cases, and peer-to-peer learning opportunities may also challenge deficit narratives, but more meaningful change likely requires deeper structural change to align academic staff incentives with inclusion. Institutions should also recognize that even in HE systems where academic staff have limited discretion in IRS selection, their perceptions likely influence supervision quality, retention, and completion. Without addressing academic staff perceptions and the underlying structures which support contemporary symbolic capital accumulation, international student recruitment risks remaining a largely instrumentalized process that perpetuates global academic inequalities rather than fostering diversity and equity. While this study is rooted in a specific national case, these findings hold broader relevance as global HE increasingly emphasizes rankings, competition, and symbolic capital accumulation.

Author

• Annette Bamberger, Bar Ilan University