Bright futures: A comparative study of internal and international mobility of chinese higher education students

• Applicant: Professor Thomas Faist, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2014 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 258508928

Young people moving away from home to seek bright futures through higher education are a major force in the urbanization of China and the internationalization of global higher education. As many as 50 million young Chinese have become urban residents or moved away from their hometowns as a result of seeking higher education, while Chinese students constitute the largest single group of international students in the richer OECD countries of the world, making up 20 percent of the total student migration to these countries. A growing proportion of these students are heading to Europe. Yet systematic research on a representative sample of these student migrants is lacking, and theoretical frameworks for migration more generally may not always apply to students moving for higher education.This research project aims to investigate key dimensions of this educational mobility, and its imports for students and their families, through conducting exploratory interviews and survey research in China, the UK and Germany. We explore this phenomenon in two related aspects: the migration of students from China to the UK and Germany for higher education, and internal migration for studies within China. This research design enables a fascinating and unusual set of comparisons, between those who stay and those who migrate, both within China and beyond its borders. We also plan to compare Chinese students in the UK and Germany with domestic students in the two countries. Differences and similarities in these groups of students will enable us to identify which types of students choose migration and how this affects their expectations about the impact of such a decision on the course of their lives. Interviews with the parents of students will enable answering questions about family strategies and educational migration.Our research will produce a valuable data set on Chinese student migrants that will be available for future researchers with new sets of questions. By generating innovative data and analytical perspectives on education as a form of migration generally and on Chinese educational migration in particular, this project will open up scholarly questions around who migrates and the effects of migration on these individuals and their families. As well as being presented at academic conferences, and circulated among networks of academic researchers focusing on education and migration, our findings will be published in a number of scholarly journal articles and monographs, in English, Chinese and German languages.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Participating Institution: Tsinghua University; University of Essex