International student migration and social stratification in China

Educational Mobility and the Gendered Geography of Cultural Capital: The Case of International Student Flows between Central Asia and the UK

“…Significantly, while a minority of students were self-funding, having rich parents who had made financial gains in Kazakhstan's shift from communism to capitalism in a process similar to that noted by Xiang and Shen (2009) in China, the student body in this study also included middle-class students whose families were comfortably off but could only afford to study abroad with state help. This highlights the role the state plays in Kazakhstan in broadening access to overseas education to a wider range of academically-able young people than is the case in many East Asian nations.…”

“…A key driver of international student mobility in this study, as elsewhere, was the desire to obtain a qualification that would make them stand out from other graduates in their chosen labour market (Waters, 2009;Xiang and Shen, 2009). For the vast majority of students this labour market was the domestic one, as there is a geographic logic to their cultural capital.…”

“…Bourdieusian analyses of the importance of overseas educational credentials in the accrual of cultural capital, and its deployment through transnational social fields, show the importance of this mobility in (re)producing the class advantage of established and recently emerged elites (Lee, 2011;Waters, 2006b;Xiang and Shen, 2009). In so doing, the research makes undoubted contributions to geographers' renewed interest in social class, one that now includes an appreciation of the importance of transnational contexts (Dowling, 2009).…”

“…Ono and Piper (2004: 103) argue that Japanese women undertake MBAs in the USA to avoid discrimination in their national labour market; however, theirs in not a paper based on empirical research and, while it points to the importance of our research agenda, it intentionally 'raises more questions than answers'. More recently, Lee (2011) highlights gender discrimination in Korea as a push factor for women to undertake graduate studies in the USA; while Xiang and Shen (2009) note that gender discrimination in the Chinese job market -and the desirable position in which having a foreign degree places women in the marriage market -can influence the decision to study abroad. In neither of these cases is gender (or indeed contingent forms of heterosexuality) the primary concern of these authors, and thus whilst they raise its prospective importance (for women at least) this remains to be more thoroughly analysed.…”

“…This paper focuses on one facet this internationalisation, namely the growth in student mobility between East and West over the past three decades. Existing research shows that changing socio-economic circumstances which place pressure on middle-class social reproduction in East Asia have been a key stimulus to growth (Huang and Yeoh, 2005;Lee H, 2010;Waters, 2006a;Xiang and Shen, 2009). In the face of challenges to families' ability to pass class status on from one generation to another, middle-class students and their parents are increasingly using overseas educational qualifications -an institutionalised form of cultural capital -to ensure they stand out from the crowd in the competition for lucrative employment opportunities and associated lifestyles.…”