Students on the move? Intellectual migration and international student mobility

ABSTRACTInternational student mobility, taking place within the framework of globalisation, internationalisation and transnationalism, has attained much attention. This paper adopts the Intellectual Migration framework to further our understanding of mobility regarding international higher education. It simultaneously studies China-born students in both China and North America to empirically examine the propensity for student mobility across national borders and the determining factors behind the realisation of such mobility under the same set of geopolitical and international circumstances. The analysis is based on a set of cross-sectional surveys conducted in the 2017–2019 period that yields over 1600 data points. We compare the ‘who’, ‘why’ and ‘where’ aspects of migration between domestic students in China and Chinese international students in North America to delineate the factors underlying international student mobility. By highlighting aspirations and capabilities on mobility outcomes, this paper contributes to differentiating mobility between undergraduate and graduate students and the implications for social inequality. Our analysis also reveals the unequal spatial distributions of educational resources between intellectual gateways and peripheries, and by extension between the Global North and the Global South. The findings of this paper have policy implications on improving the quality, accessibility, and equity of higher education.KEYWORDS: Intellectual migrationundergraduate student mobilitygraduate student mobilityChinaNorth America AcknowledgementA US National Science Foundation grant (BCS-1660526), a Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant (435-2017-1168), and a National Science Foundation of China grant (71742004) funded the research project that this article is based upon. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 We are aware that there are possibilities for Chinese undergraduate students to transfer credits to another undergraduate program abroad, or for Chinese students with undergraduate degrees to pursue another undergraduate degree overseas. But in most cases, most Chinese students would choose for program progression when studying abroad, which is the focus of this paper.