This paper examines how international study reshapes democratic judgement among returnees to democratic settings. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 45 internationally educated returnees from 26 countries, it introduces the novel concept of democratic regrounding: the renewal of democratic judgement through comparative exposure to familiar principles enacted in unfamiliar institutional and civic arrangements. The findings show that regrounding did not reliably produce visible activism. Instead, democratic engagement was mediated by reflexive deliberation, through which returnees assessed what could be pursued within specific institutional conditions. Four pathways of engagement were identified: institutional renewal, discursive reframing, civic infrastructure building, and collective mobilisation. Across cases, sustained democratic commitment depended on presence, a sustained relational stance toward public or institutional life, marked by attentiveness, comparative awareness, and endurance. Presence became visible through selective participation, refusal of complicity, strategic waiting, translation of concerns into professionally legible forms, and long-term relational work that accumulated credibility over time.
EU-China higher education cooperation has entered a period of uncertainty, yet little is known about how universities exercise institutional agency to navigate the complexities in the process. Applying institutional logics theory to 29 semi-structured interviews with university leaders, international officers and faculty leaders, this study identifies five meso-level configurations of profession, state, corporate, market and community logics. The findings show that, while universities converge on profession- and market-driven rationales for cooperation, the organization of these rationales in partner selection diverges significantly based on institutional status. Different hierarchies and interpretations of corporate and state logics create implementation frictions, whereas community logic, rooted in trust and relationships, emerges as a key buffer sustaining partnerships under adverse conditions. This study offers a process-oriented framework for understanding institutional resilience in international cooperation, highlights the urgent needs to restore interpersonal mobility among university leaders, and calls for more attention to specialist and regional universities.
This study examines the impact of short-term international student mobility on the career trajectories of graduates from low-income backgrounds. Based on semi-structured interviews with Mexican participants who studied at U.S. community colleges between 2014 to 2016, the analysis draws on concepts such as employability and transnational human capital. The findings are structured around participants' career progression, identifying three trajectory patterns: a) Continuous Career Progression, b) Career Progression with Initial Employment Difficulties, and c) No Career Progression. For each type of trajectory, the most influential factors are highlighted. Results indicate that student mobility contributes to medium-term improvements in employability and labor market positioning for socially disadvantaged individuals. However, structural factors limit its overall impact. The study concludes that, while mobility enhances the employment outcomes of individuals from low socioeconomic backgrounds, its effectiveness depends on broader social and economic conditions and on its interaction with other key factors in professional development.
Utilising inhabited institutionalism as the theoretical lens, this study explores the meaning-making process underlying Chinese international undergraduates' learning experiences at American universities, thereby offering a critical reassessment of the ISM phenomenon. Employing a qualitative methodology, the study engaged 12 Chinese international undergraduate students from a public comprehensive university in the northeastern United States. Findings indicate that prior to studying abroad, these students perceived American undergraduate education as a vague institutional myth. Their U.S. undergraduate experience fostered the development of both cognitive and non-cognitive competencies across multiple domains, which not only enhanced their prospect for admission to elite graduate schools but also helped them mitigate the challenges of diploma devaluation in the Chinese labour market. Consequently, the institutional myth is revisited through a dual process of legitimacy reinforcement. The study further highlights the need to critically examine the hierarchical or categorical nature of the global higher education structure and the epistemic violence embedded in the meaning-making process.
Scholarships are vital for promoting regional integration and human capital development within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). This study utilizes the Three Horizons framework to assess the evolution and future of Thailand's scholarship programs in the context of ASEAN's educational cooperation. Through 27 stakeholder surveys and 18 semi-structured interviews, we explore three temporal dimensions: current challenges (Horizon 1), transitional innovations (Horizon 2), and future aspirations (Horizon 3). Our findings highlight ongoing issues, including limited outbound mobility, unequal access, weak private sector involvement, and fragmented policies. By employing the Glonacal Agency Heuristic, we investigate how local, national, and regional actors influence scholarship governance, mapping governance and evolutionary trajectories. Strategic recommendations focus on inclusive design, efficient administration, varied funding, and alignment with ASEAN objectives. By viewing scholarships as instruments of knowledge diplomacy and regional solidarity, this research offers valuable insights for enhancing educational cooperation across ASEAN.
Curriculum internationalization (IoC) is widely promoted in Chinese-Foreign Cooperation in Running Schools (CFCRS) to strengthen global competencies and institutional competitiveness. Despite strong policy support, faculty engagement in IoC remains uneven, and little is known about the specific cultural, personal, and institutional factors shaping participation. This study surveyed 442 faculty across 14 CFCRS-host universities to examine faculty commitment and identify key blockers to engagement. Results showed moderately high commitment to IoC, yet engagement was constrained by disciplinary mindset limitations, perceptions of educational marketization, limited support for international industry experience, underrecognized workload allocation and limited international exposure. Multiple regression analysis confirmed that these blockers had a stronger influence on engagement than faculty perceptions. By highlighting these context-specific obstacles and their impact, the study offers actionable insights for policymakers and academic leaders to enhance faculty participation and advance sustainable IoC practices in CFCRS-host universities, supporting long-term curriculum internationalization goals.
This study critically examines how human capital and institutional readiness are constructed and operationalized in Vietnam-Korea higher education partnerships. While such collaborations are often framed as capacity-building and mutually beneficial, a qualitative multi-case study of three Vietnamese universities reveals that readiness is externally defined through metrics such as English proficiency, foreign degrees, and publication output, while overlooking relational and contextual capacities. Drawing on document analysis of MoUs and interviews with institutional actors, the study identifies four key patterns of symbolic alignment, benchmarked capital, performative readiness, and localized negotiation. In response, the paper proposes the concept of situated readiness, a context-sensitive and agency-oriented alternative to compliance-driven internationalization. By centering sub-national Global South institutions, this research contributes to ongoing debates on institutional capacity, partnership asymmetry, and the need for more reciprocal models of policy transfer in international higher education.
This study examines international student mobility (ISM) through the Chordal Triad of Agency framework, highlighting how past experiences, present evaluations, and future aspirations shape students' decisions to study abroad. Using Chinese master's students in Australia as a case study, it examines how agency is exercised to navigate structural constraints and pursue educational goals. Existing theories - push-pull theory, human capital theory, cultural capital theory, and the consumer decision-making model - often frame ISM as a rational, economically motivated, and structurally determined choice. However, this study reveals that ISM as a multi-layered, temporally embedded process shaped by social class habitus, career trajectories, and perceived structural constraints. Findings show that past experiences (iterational agency) inform students' belief in education as a pathway for mobility, while present evaluations (practical-evaluative agency) involve financial feasibility, language readiness, and migration policies. Future aspirations (projective agency) diverge: graduates seek prestigious credentials to enhance employability, whereas professionals aim to escape career stagnation. By demonstrating how agency operates pre-departure and varies across life stages, this study challenges linear decision-making models, offering a more nuanced, context-sensitive understanding of ISM that integrates both individual agency and structural factors.
The dominant analyses of trends and flows in International Student Mobility (ISM) overlook different hierarchies of destinations and the pathways students take to reach these locations. The tendency to conceptualize ISM as a linear involvement of the global elites masks the mobility patterns and trajectories of students with mobility capital shortage. Theorizing on the stepwise migration, this explanatory mixed-methods study investigates the onward migration intentions of international students in T & uuml;rkiye. Although the stepwise migration theory has been applied to explain low-skilled migration, this study partially confirms that a significant number of international students in T & uuml;rkiye have developed stepwise migration intentions toward Western countries and use T & uuml;rkiye as an intermediary, leveraging it to build and accumulate various capitals before moving on to economically developed Western destinations.
This paper explores intercultural training needs of university staff through the analysis of intercultural critical incidents that were shared by participants in a survey conducted in four universities in Switzerland. In the survey, participants were prompted to describe intercultural critical incidents, to self-assess their intercultural sensitivity and competence, and to indicate their interest in further development. Using qualitative content analysis, categories of incidents were developed based on the Critical Incident Technique. The findings suggest that participants whose scores indicate a higher level of readiness to engage in intercultural training are better able to perceive nuanced details of intercultural critical incidents and to analyse them from an ethno-relative perspective. The findings further suggest that workshops on relationship-building and empathy in intercultural contexts may offer relevant entry points for training of participants with lower scores.
Research on international students' information behaviour has significantly developed, mainly in the Global North and leaving the Global South underexplored. This review analyses 60 publications in five languages (English, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, and Indonesian) from four databases (Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, and Google Scholar). This study identifies nine sub-topics within the research, with a predominant focus on the Global North. Several topics for further investigation include online information behaviour, cultural diversity, the role of institutions, health information, digital journeys, and information sharing. The findings also highlight differences between the Global North and the Global South due to factors like IT infrastructure and sociocultural situations. This review emphasises the need for further exploration in the context of the Global South. This work contributes to a nuanced understanding of international students' information behaviour and its broader implications.
In today's interconnected world, intercultural competence (IC) is essential for navigating diverse cultural contexts across education, professional practice, and society. Yet this field still lacks a systematic, data-driven synthesis that maps its intellectual evolution. This study addresses that gap by applying bibliometric techniques to 2,178 WoS-indexed articles published up to December 31, 2024, providing comprehensive quantitative mapping of IC research to date and illuminating both its historical foundations and future frontiers. Co-citation analysis revealed four thematic clusters representing the intellectual foundations of the field: (a) theoretical frameworks and assessment models; (b) multicultural counseling competence and cultural responsiveness in psychology; (c) pedagogical integration in language education; and (d) developmental and experiential pathways of competence acquisition. Co-word analysis, in turn, identified four conceptual clusters: competence development and adaptation, cultural responsiveness in professional practice, intercultural communication in language learning, and multicultural pedagogies in teacher education. Conceptually, co-citation maps the intellectual base by showing how foundational works are connected through shared citations. In contrast, co-word captures the field's evolving discourse by revealing how key concepts co-occur and converge across studies. The two analyses link the structural foundations and semantic dynamics of intercultural competence research, illustrating how established theoretical traditions inform emerging directions in this field. While scholarship remains grounded in seminal models such as Byram's framework, Bennett's Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, and Deardorff's process model, it is moving toward more dynamic, context-contingent, and digitally mediated understandings. This study provides a systematic knowledge map that strengthens the theoretical understanding of intercultural competence and informs practical applications in education, counseling, and organizational development.
This paper analyzes the evolution of the international student mobility (ISM) network from 2000 to 2022 using UNESCO data for 214 countries and territories. It addresses three questions: (a) the structure of the ISM network, (b) how it has changed since 2000, and (c) the influence of social, political, and economic events. Findings show that while student origins are diverse, key destinations remain the U.S., U.K., Canada, and parts of Europe. The ISM network has grown denser and is organized into eight regional and linguistic clusters. Over time, global events have significantly shaped student flows and network structure. This study offers insights into how international student mobility reflects broader geopolitical and economic shifts, contributing to a deeper understanding of global education trends.
In light of the paradigm shift in the scholarship of international students that increasingly emphasizes students' agentic participation, the topic of international student agency has attracted increasing attention. This scientometric paper outlines the research intellectual map, including an overview of publications, major contributors, and research foci, using a combination of CiteSpace and Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling between 2007 and 2024. The findings reveal a growing research interest in international student agency, especially since 2017. However, despite the efforts of leading and emerging contributors, collaboration remains relatively weak, signaling the need to strengthen collaboration so that scholarly conversations keep pushing scholarly boundaries and facilitate informed policymaking. Moreover, it identifies four research foci: experiential transformation, intercultural communication, community of practice, support and strategy. This study complements the existing qualitative literature review and provides valuable implications for further research.
This systematic review explores the experiences of first-generation international graduate students in the United States. Drawing on the theoretical foundations of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of capital, Tara Yosso's concept of community cultural wealth, and Kimberlé Crenshaw's intersectionality theory, our analysis of 41 peer-reviewed articles revealed four major themes capturing their experiences: (1) sense of belonging, (2) navigating the academic system, (3) mental health and emotional wellbeing, and (4) institutional and structural support. We further analyze the findings using Crenshaw's three dimensions of intersectionality—structural, political, and representational. We interpret these findings as reflections of the layered and intersecting challenges faced by first-generation international graduate students in U.S. higher education while also highlighting the valuable assets and agency that this unique student population brings. Our study offers recommendations for changes in institutional policies, program design, and future research to promote equity and belonging for first-generation international graduate students.
Transnational Education has experienced rapid global expansion over the past three decades, yet there are many underresearched aspects. This study presents the first bibliometric analysis that that covers not only higher education but also other levels of education, including K-12. Drawing on 1,627 Scopus-indexed publications from 1972 to 2023, the findings show significant growth in TNE research, particularly since the 2010s. The UK, Australia, and the US are leading contributors, while Asian countries such as China, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Vietnam are emerging as key players. Thematic patterns vary by sector: internationalisation and institutional concerns dominate in HE, while socio-cultural and language acquisition issues feature prominently in K–12. The study highlights the significance of situating research on international schools in the broader TNE landscape, and identifies research gaps with implications for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers.
International Student Mobility (ISM) is the most popular activity in the internationalization of higher education, and it has grown over the years in terms of numbers and study destinations. This study examines intra-African student mobility using evidence from East Africa and theoretical orientations of critical internationalization, which holds that internationalization thrives on and propagates inequalities between individuals and social systems. The study investigated the extent to which intra-African ISM reproduces social inequalities using data collected through mixed methods and analyzed using SPSS and thematic analysis. The study shows that international students in Uganda are mainly from the East African region and are from the wealthiest families. The findings further indicate that these students and their households seek to reproduce their social status by participating in ISM. However, expanding mobility opportunities in favor of students from lower social classes would make internationalization more equitable and inclusive.
This article offers an ethnographic analysis of a short-term study abroad program partnering US and Haitian university students in Haiti. It draws upon study abroad literature critical of shallow views of cultural difference as well as anthropology of learning literature emphasizing process and context in the learning endeavor. The article considers underlying processes shaping student cross-cultural learning. The authors find that such learning occurred with varying depth in relation to recognition of diversity and complexity within Haitian culture itself, confronting assumptions and biases, negotiating identity within an unfamiliar context, and considerations of the embeddedness and manifestations of power in the study abroad experience. The research suggests that more attention be paid to questions of power and representation in cross-cultural encounters so that participants are able to reflect on the impact of context and power on their own learning in the study abroad encounter.
This study examines the impact of international programs on students at a peripheral college in northern Israel with an equal Israeli Arab-Jewish student population. Using an interpretive phenomenological approach, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 10 students (5 Israeli Arabs, 5 Jewish) who participated in international programs. Thematic analysis revealed four main themes: (1) English as a gateway to global academia; (2) Developing future-ready skills; (3) Fostering intercultural connections; and (4) Building academic resilience. Findings indicate that these programs enhance academic skills, particularly English proficiency and critical thinking, while promoting intercultural understanding and social cohesion in this unique peripheral college setting. This study highlights the value of international programs in diverse, peripheral college settings, offering insights for developing inclusive internationalization strategies in higher education, with implications for educational policy and practice in multicultural contexts.
In contemporary academia, many doctoral students undertake short-term research visits abroad. While prior studies acknowledge the prevalence of International Student Mobility (ISM), its causal linkages to elite academic career outcomes-and crucially, for whom these benefits accrue-remain unexamined. This study uses data from the China National Doctoral Survey to examine the benefits of ISM through LASSO regression and heterogeneous treatment effect analysis. Doctoral graduates with ISM experience exhibit a nearly 35% higher likelihood of securing elite academic positions (EAP) than their counterparts without. Moreover, the host country and the duration of stay moderate returns, with extended stays in scientifically advanced countries having a much higher likelihood of securing EAP. Further results indicate that doctoral students who are less likely to participate in ISM benefit the most from it. These findings underscore ISM's differential returns, highlighting the need for policies that boost overall effectiveness while ensuring equitable access to opportunities.
