Author: chineseedmobilities

Lan, S. (2018). State-mediated Brokerage System in China’s Self-funded Study Abroad Market. International Migration. doi:10.1111/imig.12515

Dr Shanshan Lan, University of Amsterdam

Abstract

The thriving of China’s self-funded study abroad market is marked by the tremendous increase of students who use the services of educational intermediaries to facilitate their transnational journeys. This is largely due to the marketization of China’s higher educational system and the liberalization of state policy towards commercialized brokerage services. Based on multisited fieldwork in China and Italy, this paper examines the intersections between the regulatory, the commercial, and the social dimensions of the educational migration infrastructure in China. It identifies a tension between the neoliberal ideas of individual autonomy and freedom, which are promoted by the state and private intermediaries, and the self-perpetuating nature of the educational migration infrastructure, which facilitates and constrains different groups of
parents’ and students’ desire for international education.

Ping is a middle-aged woman whom I met in summer 2015, when she accompanied her 16-year old daughter Maggie to attend a mock SAT exam held on a university campus in Jinan.1 Like the majority of my informants, Ping identifies herself as middle-class, that is the middle stratum of Chinese society. Ping and her husband are both state employees in the railway sector and both have college degrees. Although Maggie is still in her first year of high school, she has already taken the TOFEL exam twice. Ping explained her obsession with Maggie’s education: “Since this is our only child, we want to provide her the best education we can afford. Now she is performing OK in school, but we know that she won’t be able to attend an elite university in China. In China your exam score determines what major you can choose. We want to send her abroad so that she can attend a better university and choose a major based on her interest.” Ping told me that she has been following the advice of a study abroad agent, Esther, to prepare for Maggie’s eventual entry to an elite university in the United States. After the mock SAT, Ping would travel with Maggie to Shanghai to attend a six-week intensive English training course hosted by a renowned English language centre. The total cost of the trip, tuition plus food and lodging, would be around 50,000RMB. Meanwhile, since Maggie wants to major in industrial design, Esther suggested she should attend the summer school of the Chicago Art Institute next year. She convinced Ping that this pre-college overseas study trip is an important investment for Maggie’s future application for universities in the US, because it will distinguish her from other applicants from China.

Ping is just one among many middle-class Chinese parents who invest extravagantly in their children’s dreams to study abroad. According to the Chinese Ministry of Education, about 544,500 students left China in 2016 to study abroad and 91.49 per cent of them were self-funded. In 2014, the estimated value of China’s study abroad market already reached 200 billion RMB (Er, 2014). While these statistics reflect the flourishing of the education-migration industry in China, they fail to account for the anxieties, hopes, confusions and determinations experienced by Chinese parents and children in their daily life interactions with educational intermediaries from both the state and non-state sectors. With the marketization of China’s higher educational system and the commercialization of international student migration, studying abroad is often framed in popular Chinese media as a special type of educational consumption and a matter of personal choice. This article contends that recent transnational student migration from China is in fact largely facilitated and structured by the state. The diversification of brokerage services in China’s self-funded study abroad market reflects the state’s deliberate efforts to relax its control over transnational student mobility in order to relieve the problem of uneven distribution of educational resources in the country. However, state attempt to liberalize the study abroad market ends up perpetuating social inequalities due to its tacit endorsement of neoliberal ethos such as self-responsibility and self-improvement.

Due to its highly commercialized nature, educational brokerage in China starts to bear some features of international labour brokerage in regard to transnational collaborations between multiple agents and the development of complicated agent chains (Xiang, 2012). The existence of agent-chains functions to maximize profits because  it broadens the scope of student recruitment for all agents, since they can always channel students who fall outside their service range to other agents. As collaborations between agents in China intensified, some intermediaries often group the application files of all students who apply for the same university together and send them to the Italian embassy in one package. The downside of this practice is that it may significantly increase the waiting time for students whose application materials have to go through multiple agents. The profit-driven nature of commercialized intermediary practices also prompted some agents to make presumptuous promises to parents such as guaranteed admission to an overseas university and full refund in case of failed applications. In order to fulfil these promises, some agents had to resort to unethical practices such as providing falsified information concerning the student’s language skills, social activities and personal talents. One of the negative consequences is that some students who got admitted by overseas universities had to drop due to their inability to follow the curriculum. In Jinan, I encountered several Chinese students attending universities in the United States, who had to switch majors or change universities after realizing that agents’ advice did not serve their best interests.

The Chinese case study has important policy implications since much of the social inequalities in China’s higher educational system can be attributed to the uneven distribution of educational resources by the state. Reforms in China’s educational system should focus on democratic sharing of educational resources, and the cultivation of  independent thinking and problem-solving capacities among Chinese students. This will prepare them to handle the many challenges of studying abroad and also decrease their dependence on commercialized agents. To protect the interests of student migrants, the state needs to play a more active role in the professionalization of educational brokerage services. To the extent that agents can persuade parents to buy expensive training courses in preparation for elite university application, and to influence student’s  choice of study majors and universities, unethical intermediary practices can be detrimental to the future development of student migrants. This problem has already been manifested by recent examples of Chinese students being expelled from US schools due to low grades, academic dishonesty and breaking rules (Zuo, 2015). From the receiving  country’s perspective, host universities should advertise their services for international students more aggressively in China, instead of depending on recruitment agents. Once students learn that many of the overseas services provided by intermediaries in China can be freely obtained from the host universities’ international office, they are less likely to purchase expensive service packages from study abroad agents. This may help them to avoid some of the pitfalls in educational consumption covered in this article.

Author Bio

Shanshan Lan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include urban anthropology, migration and mobility regimes, comparative racial formations in Asia and Euro-America, transnational student mobility,  African diaspora in China, Chinese diaspora in the United States, and class and social transformations in Chinese society. Lan is the Principal Investigator of the ERC project “The reconfiguration of whiteness in China: Privileges, precariousness, and racialized performances” (CHINAWHITE, 2019-2024). For more information, please see www.china-white.org

Willy Sier, University of Amsterdam

This anthropological research, based on one year of fieldwork in Hubei province (2015-2016), focuses on the contradictory experiences of ‘education migrants’, which are the growing number of Chinese rural youth who migrate to the city via the country’s higher education system. These youth’ enrolment in universities has been an important contributing factor to the rapid expansion of the Chinese higher education system since 1998. Yet their limited access to high-quality education within this higher education system results in the reproduction of rural-urban inequalities in the urban Chinese labour market, where education migrants largely work under precarious conditions in informal, white-collar jobs.

The rapid growth of China’s education system is often celebrated as an ‘educational miracle’ that promises further economic growth and development as well as the mitigation of rural-urban inequalities in Chinese society. My work critiques the idea of education as a unequivocally positive force that has the potential to alleviate social problems ranging from poverty to gender inequality, and demonstrates that the blind pursuit of low-quality education sometimes makes for a wasteful journey with disappointing results. It shows that education migrants’ access to higher education is largely restricted to universities in the bottom segment of the highly stratified Chinese higher education system. The university degrees that youth obtain in these universities translate into poorly paid and unstable jobs that do not enable education migrants to achieve their main goals: building up stable lives in the cities and providing support for their family members.

This project is interested in the linkages between processes of educational expansion and urbanisation. It therefore studies the experiences of education migrants in the context of China’s rural-urban transition, and views educational expansion as an important tool for achieving state urbanisation goals as well as preparing rural communities for “agricultural modernisation”, the term the Chinese government uses to refer to processes of scaling up through land consolidation. In addition to a book manuscript under preparation, the first results of this project are expected to come out in the form of academic articles.

The first article, called ‘The price of aspirations: education migrants’ pursuit of a new stability through higher education in Hubei province, China’, brings an analysis of the structural condition of China’s social transformation and higher education system into dialogue with a discussion about the goals Chinese rural youth aspire to achieve. It analyses in detail how one families’ choices in relation to their children’s education are rooted in changing land policies and how students’ rural status inhibits their success within the Chinese higher education system. It also presents research data gathered among rural high school students that shows how students’ awareness of the challenges faced by their parents shapes their motivations.

The second article, ‘Daughters’ dilemmas: university-educated women in the rural Chinese household in Hubei province, China’, looks at education migrants’ experiences through a gendered lens and demonstrates in which ways the increased participation of rural women in higher education changes the role of rural daughters in the household. The cases presented in this paper show that highly educated women struggle to use their newly gained status as university graduates for the betterment of their families’ situations and their own position in the city without hurting their position on the marriage market, where they might be perceived as a ‘hero women’ who prioritise career over family. 

Author Bio

Willy Sier is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. Her PhD-research focused on rural university students in Wuhan and the role of China’s higher education system in the country’s rural-urban transformation. Currently, she works on a project on whiteness in China (https://www.china-white.org). To see her in action, please see her short film “Empty Home”: https://vimeo.com/209590747. She can be contacted at w.m.sier@uva.nl and she tweets @WillySier.

Yuyang Kang, Lingnan University

Kang, Y. (2019). Institutional Social Capital and Chinese International Branch Campus: A Case Study from Students’ Perspectives. In Contesting Globalization and Internationalization of Higher Education (pp. 163-178). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Article Summary

In the special context of International Branch Campuses (IBCs) in China, which operate somewhat midway between Chinese and Western cultures, this chapter looks specifically at the role of institutional social capital and how it influences Chinese students’ university experiences, focusing in particular on what and how social capital is transmitted and accumulated by students within the IBC. Empirical data was gathered through in-depth interviews with current students, graduates and faculty members of one IBC in China (IBC-A, hereafter). This chapter argues that although certain aspects of institutional social capital may be curtailed, students still have many chances to cultivate their social capital in an IBC context. However, the most commonly addressed function of institutional social capital (that is, its role in students’ job-hunting) was not observed in this research.

Based upon findings generated from the interviews with students, this research finds that the assumption that IBCs can provide better institutional social capital is part of the reason why some Chinese students choose to study at an IBC. Some students believe that networking opportunities at IBC-A are better than other institutions in China, with gaokao (Chinese National College Entrance Examination) scores and high tuition fee as two compulsory requirements for entry. The university enrolls Chinese Mainland students only through the channel of the Ministry of Education (MoE), which means gaokao is the prerequisite. In 2014, the average gaokao score of IBC-A newly enrolled students majoring in science was 650, which was 18 points higher than that of Ningbo University and 49 points lower than the average of Zhejiang University. Ningbo University is neither a 985 nor 211 project university while Zhenjiang University is one of the top 10 higher education institutions in China. Although IBC-A usually avoids being compared with other universities in China’s public higher education system, the gaokao score indicates it is viewed as a good but not top university by Chinese students and their parents. Moreover, most of the students in IBC-A come from relatively well-off family. In 2012, IBC-A raised its annual tuition fee for undergraduate students from 60,000 Yuan to 80,000 Yuan, which was 15 to 20 times higher than the fees charged by a typical Chinese public university. According to the Statistical Yearbook of China, the per capita annual income of Chinese urban households was 24,564.7 Yuan in 2012 (National Bureau of Statistics, 2015). Therefore, it is reasonable to state only individuals from relatively rich families can afford the tuition at IBC-A.

Regarding cultivation of institutional social capital, this research finds that it might be difficult for IBC-A students to maintain long-term contact with faculty members. Both students and staff who were interviewed mentioned that faculty members tend to stay only for a few years at IBC-A. In addition to commonly known disadvantages of working in China such as blocked internet access, the interviews with faculty members reveal that IBC-A has two systems of faculty recruitment. The home University A directly recruits some of the faculty from the UK and those recruited are usually registered at both University A and IBC-A. The Chinese campus also recruits faculty members on a global scale on its own. Faculty members recruited via the latter channel are only signed as IBC-A faculty instead of University A. The differentiation or inequality in administration and management increase the tension within faculties and undermines people’s willingness to stay. As IBC-A is still running under deficit, it is also difficult for faculty members to get promoted. After two or three years at IBC-A, many faculty members find it difficult to be promoted and decide to move to other institutions for the development of their careers.  After a faculty member leaves for other institutions, some of the students find it difficult to keep in contact, as the teachers would change their contact information too. It also sets obstacles for those who need to find references for their further studies, which is very common among IBC-A students.

Although some institutional social capital might be curtailed by faculty turnover, students still have many chances to cultivate their social capital in an IBC context. Because of differences in higher education systems, IBC-A students need to take fewer courses than their peers in Chinese universities and students at the UK-style university are expected to be more independent in learning. Although the students interviewed tend to hold varied attitudes toward the reduced course hours, it is noticeable that fewer course hours allow IBC-A students to actively engage in extra-curricular activities and increase their sense of being members of the ‘corps.’ This paper reveals that fewer course hours together with smaller classes and students’ higher intention to build networks with each other are three factors that contribute to lasting social connections among IBC-A students and alumni.

Studies of social capital, especially institutional social capital, are unequivocal about how institutional social capital helps students to find their first jobs after graduation. However, in this study, there is no strong evidence indicating correlation between institutional social capital and IBC-A students’ first jobs. The main reason is that most of the graduates go on to postgraduate study outside of China instead of finding a local job. Interviews with IBC-A students reveals that most of them believe there are fundamental differences between IBC-A and other Chinese universities and a mismatch between demands of local job market and the IBC graduates. Some students found it difficult to adapt to the local job market and the massification of higher education in China makes it increasingly difficult to secure a good job with a bachelor’s degree only. According to the participants, only a few students planned to go directly to work after their four-years’ study, and this group of students mainly intended to take jobs in foreign companies or jobs that their families found for them.

This paper has examined the role of institutional social capital in Chinese IBC students’ university experiences. It contributes to current institutional social capital literature by showing its special role in recruitment of Chinese students. Based upon findings generated from the interviews with students, this research finds that the assumption that IBCs can provide better institutional social capital is part of the reason why some Chinese students choose to study at an IBC. Because of historical and cultural circumstances, young Chinese individuals being educated in a Western-style university still attach special importance to being a member of certain institutions. It might be difficult for IBC-A students to maintain long-term contact with faculty members who tend to move to other institutions, which curtails accumulation of certain institutional social capital. However, fewer course hours together with smaller classes and students’ higher intention to build networks with each other are three factors that contribute to lasting social connections among IBC-A students and alumni. Despite these positive factors indicating the strong potential for developing institutional social capital, the job-finding effect of institutional social capital was not obvious in this research because a large portion of the graduates did not go to work directly after their graduation.

Author Biography

Yuyang Kang is PhD candidate in Sociology and Social Policy at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. This paper is developed from her thesis submitted to King’s College London. Her research interests are in the subfield of internationalization of higher education and the role of HEIs in local innovation development. Her current projects focus on graduate entrepreneurs in the Great Bay Area of China. Her PhD is funded by Hong Kong PhD Fellowship and she is also the awardee of Sino-British Fellowship Trust Fund and Fung Scholarship.