Determinants of International Students' Educational Mobility: a Comparative Study of Japan and Germany

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In FY 2021, the main research goals were literature review, researching policy regarding international education, and collecting published statistical and interview data among international students in Japan and Germany.Through the collaboration with Professor Karen Shire, our German counterpart at the University of Duisburg-Essen, the team, with the assistance of 5 research assistants, managed to collect over 120 in-depth interviews with international students in Japan and in Germany. At the same time, we collected policy documents and statistics of international students in Germany. The team set up the qualitative data base for interviews using MaxQDA.Because of the travel restriction due to COVID, we were not able to do field research overseas. Instead, the field work, combined with an international conference, took place in July, 2022.The PI analyzed the data from the interviews with Chinese students, and presented the results at the International Conference on International Student Mobility in Fulda, Germany, titled: "The difficulties of an easier path: Chinese students’ educational experiences and school-to-work transition in Germany and Japan."The presentation discusses Chinese students’ motivations and experiences of studying abroad in Germany and Japan and points out that the process of international education involves different stakeholders whose logics for student mobility might be conflicting. This presentation presents the concept of “socially constructed necessity” to describe the motivations observed among individual students.