Bright Futures: Survey of Chinese international students in the UK, Germany and Japan and of domestic students in China, 2017-2018

This is a cross-national survey of Chinese international students in the UK, Germany and Japan, with comparison groups of domestic students in the UK, Germany, and Japan, as well as a comparison group of domestic students in China. The study population are taught (undergraduate and postgraduate) students of the listed groups. Areas covered in the questionnaires: Socio-demographic characteristics and course details; family background (parental education, occupation, household income, siblings); prior education (academic achievement and educational migration); motivations for studying abroad and decision-making processes; individuality traits and values (e.g., achievement orientation, risk-taking attitude); study experience in current course; health and wellbeing; future life course aspirations; cosmopolitan vs national orientations.

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. Chinese students constitute the largest single group of international students in the richer OECD countries in the world, making up 20 percent of total student migration to these countries. Yet systematic research into a representative sample of these student migrants is scarce, and, more generally, theoretical frameworks for migration may not always be relevant to students moving for higher education reasons. Bright Futures is a pioneering study that investigates key dimensions of this educational mobility through large-scale representative survey research in China, the UK and Germany. We explore this phenomenon in terms of two related aspects: the migration of students from the People's Republic of China to the UK and Germany for higher education reasons, and internal migration in order to study within China. This research design provides a rare opportunity for direct comparisons between those who stay and those who migrate, both within China and beyond its borders. We also compare Chinese students in the UK and Germany with domestic students in the same two countries. Through such comparisons we are able to address a number of theoretical questions such as selectivity in educational migrations, aspirations beyond returns, the impact of transnationalization of higher education on individual orientations and life-course expectations, and the link between migration and the wellbeing of the highly educated. Bright Futures is a collaborative project (ESRC project number ES/L015633/1), involving researchers from the University of Essex, the University of Edinburgh, UNED, the University of Bielefeld and Tsinghua University. The research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC, UK), the German Research Foundation (DFG, Germany) and the National Natural Science Foundation (China). A related project, Asian Educational Mobilities: A Comparative Study of International Migration of Japanese and Chinese Higher Education Students (ESRC project number ES/N019024/1, funded by the ESRC and the DFG) collected data for a smaller-scale survey of Chinese and Japanese students in Japan which supplements the other surveys. This survey provides data on Chinese international students in another destination country and includes domestic students for comparison.

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