Bright futures: A comparative study of internal and international mobility of chinese higher education students

年轻人走出家门，通过高等教育寻求光明的未来，是中国城市化和全球高等教育国际化的重要力量。多达5000万中国年轻人成为城市居民或因寻求高等教育而离开家乡，而中国学生是世界上较富裕的经合组织国家中最大的国际学生群体，占这些国家学生移民总数的20%。这些学生中越来越多的人前往欧洲。然而，对这些学生移民的代表性样本缺乏系统的研究，更普遍的移民理论框架可能并不总是适用于高等教育的学生。本研究项目旨在通过在中国，英国和德国进行探索性访谈和调查研究，调查这种教育流动的关键维度，以及它对学生和他们的家庭的影响。我们从两个相关的方面来探讨这一现象：中国学生到英国和德国接受高等教育的移民，以及中国境内学习的内部移民。这种研究设计使得一组有趣而不寻常的比较成为可能，这些比较是在中国境内和境外的那些留下来的人和那些迁移的人之间进行的。我们还计划将在英国和德国的中国学生与这两个国家的国内学生进行比较。这些学生群体的差异和相似之处将使我们能够确定哪些类型的学生选择移民，以及这如何影响他们对这种决定对他们生活的影响的期望。通过对学生家长的访谈，我们将回答有关家庭策略和教育移民的问题。我们的研究将产生一个关于中国学生移民的有价值的数据集，为未来的研究人员提供新的问题集。通过生成关于教育作为一种移民形式的创新数据和分析视角，特别是关于中国教育移民的创新数据和分析视角，该项目将围绕谁移民以及移民对这些人及其家庭的影响展开学术问题。除了在学术会议上提出，并在以教育和移徙为重点的学术研究人员网络中传播外，我们的研究结果还将以英文、中文和德文发表在一些学术期刊文章和专著中。

Young people moving away from home to seek bright futures through higher education are a major force in the urbanization of China and the internationalization of global higher education. As many as 50 million young Chinese have become urban residents or moved away from their hometowns as a result of seeking higher education, while Chinese students constitute the largest single group of international students in the richer OECD countries of the world, making up 20 percent of the total student migration to these countries. A growing proportion of these students are heading to Europe. Yet systematic research on a representative sample of these student migrants is lacking, and theoretical frameworks for migration more generally may not always apply to students moving for higher education.This research project aims to investigate key dimensions of this educational mobility, and its imports for students and their families, through conducting exploratory interviews and survey research in China, the UK and Germany. We explore this phenomenon in two related aspects: the migration of students from China to the UK and Germany for higher education, and internal migration for studies within China. This research design enables a fascinating and unusual set of comparisons, between those who stay and those who migrate, both within China and beyond its borders. We also plan to compare Chinese students in the UK and Germany with domestic students in the two countries. Differences and similarities in these groups of students will enable us to identify which types of students choose migration and how this affects their expectations about the impact of such a decision on the course of their lives. Interviews with the parents of students will enable answering questions about family strategies and educational migration.Our research will produce a valuable data set on Chinese student migrants that will be available for future researchers with new sets of questions. By generating innovative data and analytical perspectives on education as a form of migration generally and on Chinese educational migration in particular, this project will open up scholarly questions around who migrates and the effects of migration on these individuals and their families. As well as being presented at academic conferences, and circulated among networks of academic researchers focusing on education and migration, our findings will be published in a number of scholarly journal articles and monographs, in English, Chinese and German languages.