This book explores questions around the meaning and significance of international student migration. Framed in relation to the mobilities – and immobilities – of international students, the book highlights various key themes emerging from the rich interdisciplinary scholarship in this area, including socio-economic diversification in mobile students, the differential value of international higher education, and citizenship and state-building projects. It also discusses the importance of considering ethics in relation to student migrants. This pioneering book will be of interest and value to scholars of student mobilities and the international student experience more widely, as well as practitioners and policy makers.

This book explores questions around the meaning and significance of international student migration. Framed in relation to the mobilities – and immobilities – of international students, the book highlights various key themes emerging from the rich interdisciplinary scholarship in this area, including socio-economic diversification in mobile students, the differential value of international higher education, and citizenship and state-building projects. It also discusses the importance of considering ethics in relation to student migrants. This pioneering book will be of interest and value to scholars of student mobilities and the international student experience more widely, as well as practitioners and policy makers.

This book examines an emergent pattern of international student mobility: that of international students from across the African continent who are enrolled on degree programmes at Chinese universities. China is among the most popular destination countries for African students, yet there has been little research to-date into this emergent mobility pattern. Drawing on data from a series of interviews, the book focuses on the specific modalities of integration into the global economy of both the sending region and the host country, and examines how these shape the decision-making, experiences, and future aspirations of mobile students. It also highlights how incipient flows of international student migrants, such as those between various African countries and China, are calling into question a number of the axioms around the study of international study mobility that were developed with reference to more established migration patterns, which tend to flow from other regions to the West. These include, for example, the idea that international students are generally privileged members of the global middle class who seek an education abroad as part of a strategy to accumulate cultural capital and reproduce social privilege. This novel work is of interest to researchers in human geography, sociology, development studies, migration studies, and particularly those studying China-Africa relations.

How universities in the US and South Korea compete for global student markets—and how university financials shape students’ lives. The popular image of the international student in the American imagination is one of affluence, access, and privilege, but is that image accurate? In this provocative book, higher education scholar Stephanie Kim challenges this view, arguing that universities—not the students—allow students their international mobility. Focusing on universities in the US and South Korea that aggressively grew their student pools in the aftermath of the Great Recession, Kim shows the lengths universities will go to expand enrollments as they draw from the same pool of top South Korean students. Kim closely follows several students attending a university in Berkeley and a university in Seoul. They have chosen different paths to study abroad or learn at home, but all are seeking a transformative educational experience. To show how student mobility depends on institutional structures, Kim demonstrates how the universities themselves compel students’ choices to pursue higher learning at one institution or another. She also profiles the people who help ensure the global student supply chain runs smoothly, from education agents in South Korea to community college recruiters in California. Using ethnographic research gathered over a ten-year period in which international admissions were impacted by the Great Recession, changes in US presidential administrations, and the COVID-19 pandemic, Constructing Student Mobility provides crucial insights into the purpose, effects, and future of student recruitment across the Pacific.

The realm of higher education, much like everything else in a global and mobile world, has rapidly altered in the last few decades. More and more universities and seats of higher education are using strategies towards ' 'internationalization'; by increasing heterogeneity in rank, student composition, resource endowments, faculty profiles, and their social spaces. The essays in this volume take a critical look at universities across South Asia, more specifically, at the dynamics of student mobility and mobilizations existing in such localized social spaces, and compares these with their counterparts in universities across the world. While elite universities in South Asia, as elsewhere, have been caught in a stiff international competition and are aspiring for the highest ranks, students from the most excluded communities and remote parts of the country seek entry to badly endowed universities, facing obstacles during their courses, and upon seeking entry into employment. The volume evaluates such universities as spaces for mobility opportunity and mobilizations in a globally networked world. It combines local and international perspectives with thorough observations of the dynamics in localized university spaces while embedding them in transnational processes.

While mobility trajectories and experiences are key in migrants’ lives, they are relatively neglected in the field of migration studies. Using mobility as a unique angle of approach, the Handbook of Human Mobility and Migration is a pioneering assessment of the theoretical concerns, empirical questions and issues of governance surrounding international mobility and migration today.

Since the turn of the millennium it has become clear that the Asia-Pacific Region is, economically, the fastest growing continent in the world, and is likely to remain so for some time despite the setbacks of the COVID-19 pandemic. Asia-Pacific's share of the world's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) doubled from 15 per cent to 30 per cent between 1970 and 2017 and is projected to account for half of global GDP by 2050. With South East and South Asia also growing rapidly, with over half the world's population and three of the world's five largest economies, Asia is soon poised to home half of the world's middle class - a class that is both the driver and the product of higher education. The quality of a country's system of higher education may be seen both as a gauge of its current level of national development as well as of its future economic prospects. It is therefore natural that the putative "Asian Century" should generate interest in the region's higher education systems which, on the one hand, share common characteristics-a fixation with credentials and engineering, high technology (especially among male students), and business degrees-while at the same time are also highly differentiated, not only across countries but also within. As such, a better understanding of higher education achievements, failings, potential, and structural limitations in the Asia-Pacific Region is imperative. This handbook presents a number of significant country case-studies and documents cross-cutting trends relating to, among other things: the trilemma faced by governments juggling competing claims of access, accessible cost, and quality; the balance between teaching and research; the links between labour markets (demand) and higher education (supply); preferred fields of study and their consequences; the rise of the research university in Asia; the lure of institutions of international reputation within the region; new education technologies and their effects; and, trends in government policy within the wider region and sub-regions.

Contributing to the shaping of education and migration as a distinct field of research, this forward-looking Research Handbook explores cross-cutting questions on the range of challenges facing education systems, migrant children and students today.