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

年轻人走出家门，通过高等教育寻求美好未来，是中国城镇化和全球高等教育国际化的一支主力军。多达5000万中国年轻人因为寻求高等教育而成为城市居民或离开家乡，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，对这些学生流动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接受高等教育的学生。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及其对学生及其家庭的影响。我们从两个相关的方面对这一现象进行了探讨：从中国到英国和德国接受高等教育的学生移民，以及在中国内部学习的内部移民。这种研究设计使得那些留下来的人和那些在中国境内外迁徙的人之间进行了一组有趣而不同寻常的比较。我们还计划将在英国和德国的中国学生与两国的国内学生进行比较。这些学生群体的不同和相似之处将使我们能够确定哪些类型的学生选择移徙，以及这如何影响他们对这一决定对其人生进程的影响的预期。对学生家长的采访将有助于回答有关家庭战略和教育移民的问题。我们的研究将产生关于中国学生移民的宝贵数据集，供未来提出新问题的研究人员使用。通过产生关于教育作为一种移民形式，特别是关于中国教育移民的创新数据和分析观点，该项目将打开关于谁是移民以及移民对这些人及其家庭的影响的学术问题。除了在学术会议上发表，并在专注于教育和移民的学术研究人员网络中传播外，我们的研究成果还将以英语、中文和德语发表在一些学术期刊文章和专著上。

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.