East to West: International Educational Migration of East Asian Undergraduates to the United States
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2024
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Haverford College. Department of Sociology
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Open access
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Abstract
Annual international tertiary educational migration has tripled over the past few decades. These millions of contemporary educational migrants represent enormous flows of people, goods, culture, knowledge, and money moving around the world. A large part of this growth is due to the immense quantity of students from Asia coming to popular anglophone destinations such as the US, the UK, and Australia. Conducting interviews with 12 East Asian international students, I explore how international students decide and understand whether to pursue a tertiary degree at an undergraduate institution in the US or in their home country. I challenge extant frameworks in the burgeoning international student migration literature by arguing that predominant approaches erroneously reduce the phenomenon of international educational migration to oversimplified macrohistorical analysis that disregards the holistic, micro individual judgments part of choosing where to pursue a degree. Through analyzing qualitative data from interviews, I find that those who came to the US all shared a background of past international experiences that influenced them in pursuing a degree overseas. Interviewees all claimed personal ownership over the decision to go abroad, expressing that they were not compelled, but many also explained that it was almost expected of them given their current trajectory. This has significant implications for the literature, as opposed to how it is commonly posited, the decision to go abroad is not of a moment—or even a period of time—but is formulated through other earlier choices. These choices are nebulously made by or for them by interested parties, often parents, and are compounded by various social influences and contextual factors. One significant inclination I highlight is a commonly-expressed intrinsic, high value placed on abstract, future freedom that they would receive as a product of going abroad as opposed to staying at home.