The Impact of Studies and Scholarships Abroad on Developmental Commitment at Home. A Case Study about DAAD and Fulbright Alumni from the Global South (working title)

本研究的总体目标是确定和分析移民、教育和发展之间的联系。确切地说，我们想调查前国际学生如何在他们的原籍国从事发展活动，以及国外的学习和奖学金项目是否会对这些发展活动产生影响。我们提出这个问题，是因为国际学生被认为是“理想的移民”，当他们作为高技能工人进入留学国的劳动力市场时，他们受过良好的教育，很好地融入了社会。他们对原籍国也很有价值，因为他们可以通过移徙或跨国网络从国外转移他们所获得的知识和资本，这可以促进原籍国的发展。因此，越来越多的国家（留学和原籍国）希望通过向国际学生颁发奖学金来支持这些发展。然而，目前还没有关于获得奖学金与前学生发展投入之间的相关性的重要研究。在一个先驱项目中，我们已经调查了KAAD奖学金项目中前国际学生在原籍国与发展相关的承诺形式（Krannich/Hunger 2020，见1最新进展和初步工作）。然而，这项研究的结果并不代表一般的国际学生，因为KAAD是德国一个相对较小的、与宗教有关的奖学金项目，每年资助不到400名国际奖学金获得者，而且受合同约束，他们必须在毕业后回到原籍国。因此，我们调查的主要是归国留学生，只有少数留在德国的留学生（约占10%）。然而，研究结果表明，奖学金项目与国际校友未来发展参与之间可能存在联系，但需要更多地研究那些回到原籍国的学生以及毕业后留在学习国的学生。因此，本提交的项目特别旨在以德国DAAD奖学金项目和美国富布赖特奖学金项目（各自国家最大的奖学金项目）为例，调查来自全球南方国家（特别是哥伦比亚、加纳和印度尼西亚）的国际校友的奖学金与发展承诺之间的联系，这将更具代表性和有效性。

The broad objective of this study is to identify and analyze links between migration, education, and development. Precisely, we want to investigate how former international students engage in developmental activities in their country of origin and whether studies and scholarship programs abroad can have an impact on these developmental activities at home. We raise this question, because international students are perceived as „ideal migrants,“ who are well-educated and well-integrated when they enter the labor market as highly skilled workers in the country of studies. They are also valuable for the countries of origin, because they can transfer their gained know- how and capital back by remigration or transnational networks from abroad, which can contribute to the development in countries of origin. Therefore, more and more countries (of studies as well as of origin) want to support these developments by awarding scholarships to international students. However, there is no significant research yet on the correlation between received scholarships and developmental engagement of former students.In a forerunner project, we already investigated forms of development-related commitment of former international students in the countries of origin in the case of the scholarship program of the KAAD (Krannich/Hunger 2020, see 1 State of the art and preliminary work). However, the findings of the study are not representative for international students in general, because the KAAD is a relatively small and religiously-bound scholarship program in Germany that funds less than 400 international scholarship holders per year, and, bound by contract, they have to go back to their country of origin after graduation. For this reason, we investigated mainly returned students, and only a few ones who remained in Germany (about 10 percent). However, the results implied that there could be a linkage between scholarship programs and future developmental engagement of international alumni, but it needs more research on the ones who go back to the country of origin as well as the ones who remain after graduation in the country of studies. Therefore, this submitted project aims particularly to investigate the linkage between scholarships and developmental commitments of international alumni from the Global South – particularly from Colombia, Ghana and Indonesia – in the specific cases of the scholarship programs of the DAAD in Germany and Fulbright in the United States (the largest scholarship programs in their countries), which would have more representativeness and validity.