International student mobility and after-study lives: the portability and prospects of overseas education in Asia

Abstract

Over the last few decades, international student mobility has come to be increasingly viewed in both scholarly and policy discourse as a valorised pathway to personal development, career success, and class reproduction. This framing of international study has been particularly prominent in accounts of mobility to Anglophone universities that have dominated the literature to date. Yet, despite these claims, most research has been undertaken with current students, and hence, the significance of international study has remained speculative and caught up with dominant discourses that tend to valorise this form of mobility. In this paper, we subject these claims to critical examination by analysing the narratives of alumni who have studied overseas in three leading universities in East Asia. We focus, in particular, on the ways in which international student mobility articulates through after-study lives in terms of the forms of situated learning and cultural capital expressed by alumni, the geographical configurations and circulations that shape the portability of education, and altered sensibility and onward mobilities that are generated through international study. Through this discussion, we demonstrate that international study often does have value in after-study lives, but that this value is highly situated in the networks and spaces that alumni move through and enact. Our paper then demonstrates that there is nothing automatic about the portability of overseas education, and that there is a need for scholars to examine not only student mobility itself but the way this unfolds into after-study lives.