A significant increase in internationally mobile students has been observed in the past decades. With the strong intention of enhancing their competitiveness in the global labour market, a growing number of students have embarked on their learning journeys through studying abroad or enrolling in transnational Higher Education programmes. These…

Despite China's recent remarkable performance in high-quality research, the number of students going abroad to pursue doctoral degrees in STEM fields has been rising rapidly. This study investigates the motivations of Chinese international doctoral students (CIDS) in STEM fields for undertaking a PhD abroad, and the external factors influencing…

In recent years, "creating world-class universities" has been an important project on the Chinese mainland. With the all-encompassing internationalization of higher education in the global market, it is of the utmost importance that the quality of universities be improved and that some of the top universities are pushed to become…

This article reports the results of qualitative analyses of data drawn from monthly informal individual interviews of 29 American college students who were spending one semester studying Mandarin Chinese abroad in a program in China. While some data confirm previous findings that some students' identification as Americans was strengthened during…

This article complicates dominant instrumentalist understandings of international student motivation by focusing on Chinese female tertiary students in Australia. Based on longitudinal fieldwork with 56 such students, it analyses motivations described by students and their parents in interviews, showing that these far exceed instrumentalism and…

In this study, the author focuses on the issue of country image in destination choice. To examine the relationship between these two variables, the study tests whether mainland Chinese who favor a destination as their ideal first choice for study abroad have a significantly more positive view of that destination's country image than their…

In a time of growing competition for tertiary education, international students represent an important resource. However, more work is required to detail the factors that influence destination choice in study abroad. Drawing from a representative sample (n = 620) of the adult population over 19 in the Republic of Korea, the present study examined…

Drawing on in-depth interview data from 31 mainland Chinese (MLC) students in a Hong Kong university, this article conceptualises MLC and Hong Kong higher education as two dissonant but interrelated subfields of the Chinese higher education field. The article argues that these MLC students' habitus, one that possesses rich economic, social and…

This article investigates the views of quality in higher education held by two groups of international students: Chinese students at a Danish university and Danish students at Chinese universities. Given that there are no agreed international "quality standards" in higher education, we analysed the students' understanding of the…

This paper examines ideologies of American study abroad in politically and culturally "non-Western" countries. Drawing from the theory of orientalism (Said, 1978), we analyze how American public discourse on study abroad for learners of Mandarin and Arabic manifests an orientalist thinking, and how such macro discourse both produces…

Neoliberalism, as an ideology that valorizes and institutionalizes market-based freedom and individual entrepreneurship, derives from the logic of highly advanced capitalism, and thus must be understood in relation to the material conditions of our capitalist economy. One such material condition is space. However, the intersection of space and…

This article explores the real life experience of international students' and the importance of study abroad for their personal and professional development. The empirical data drawn upon for this article came from the author's master's research, with field research conducted in the 2010/2011 academic year. It begins with the study focus and…

The number of students studying in a country other than their own has dramatically increased in recent years. In 2010, over 3.7 million students studied abroad; in 2014, the number had grown to over 4.5 million students. Asian countries are the predominant places of origin. When students live and study in a new country, in addition to studying,…

Study abroad is one aspect of global movement that connects individuals of diverse backgrounds. Individuals studying abroad are proffered to negotiate self-identity when they confront novelty and new contexts. This study chose to use the qualitative method of phenomenological interviews to examine how individuals experience themselves and others…

Purpose: Drawing on career and self-initiated expatriation/repatriation literatures, this paper aims to examine the career experiences of Chinese self-initiated repatriates after their return to China. Design/methodology/approach: The authors conducted an exploratory, qualitative study involving in-depth interviews with 20 Chinese individuals who…