International Student Mobility: The Role of Social Networks

By Suzanne Beech (@suzanneebeech)

I have a new paper online early with Social and Cultural Geography, it is the second to come out of my PhD thesis on international higher education and the factors which influence students in their decision to study abroad. This paper focuses on one of the biggest factors effecting student mobility (and many other forms of mobility as well) - the role of social networks of friendship and kinship. It looks at the experience of 38 international students studying at three UK universities who were either interviewed or took part in a small focus group between March 2011 and February 2012. Each of the students that took part was enrolled on a diploma seeking programme of study (i.e. their period of time overseas was for the duration of their degree, rather than related to a temporary exchange or sojourn abroad). They came from 23 different countries and were studying both at undergraduate and postgraduate level. While I did not explicitly ask them about their socio-economic background it is likely that, given higher education mobility is often a very expensive pursuit, they came from relatively well-off backgrounds.  What was common to every one of the students that took part was the centrality of their friends and family in making their decision, their social networks were key to their mobility.

1.        What is a social network?

Social networks in this context are not limited to online social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The social networks in which my research is interested are much broader than this. At the most basic level they represent the multiple people (or actors) that a person communicates and interacts with in their day-to-day lives sharing resources and information in the process. Your social network is therefore anyone who you know well enough to engage in conversation, even if that conversation takes place along very limited lines. Any one person can, therefore, have hundreds of people in their social networks and can be part of numerous (sometimes overlapping) social networks e.g. your family could be one social network, your work colleagues another, the people in your tutorial group another and so on. International students, like everyone else, are part of complex networks of individuals all sharing information with one another. John Urry (2007; 2003) has written about how these networks shape mobility by creating connections between people through which they are able to share their experiences of being mobile. Members of a network are therefore able to tell others of the benefits of engaging in mobility and how to become more mobile themselves. It is therefore through networks that mobility often takes place.

2.       How do social networks influence mobility amongst international students?

My research shows that social networks operate in two ways in relation to international students. First, they can offer explicit advice and encouragement. This is perhaps less common than you may think, certainly most students did not admit to seeking out advice and encouragement – perhaps because international student mobility is often considered (at least socially) an individual activity where you go out and forge your own lifecourse – but there was evidence of some students actively turning to others for advice. Aimee from Canada for example spoke to people in her field about the value of an overseas degree, Subash and Sachin (from India) both turned to Facebook to find people who had also studied their course in the UK and Lily (from Malaysia) talked about the importance of being able to discuss her course with current students when on an open day.

    

More common, however, was the concept that social networks were about sharing the lived experiences of overseas mobility. In this context their social networks did not so much offer them advice and encouragement instead they began to normalise the process of going overseas. Asan (from Nepal) discussed how in his school it was normal for almost everyone to study abroad, suggesting a huge “95 per cent” went overseas (this is possibly an exaggeration, but whether literal or not it is clear that lots of people chose to do so). Marianna (from Greece) wanted to have the same experiences that a friend had when she studied in the UK. Hazel (from the USA) watched friends go backpacking in Europe and wanted to have a similar experience. As Urry (2007) suggests, they had built a greater awareness of travel which had normalised engaging in long term mobility, leading to point 3…

3.     Social networks establish cultures of mobility.

What is interesting is that these networks become self-perpetuating to an extent. More people study overseas and share their experience (either explicitly or implicitly) with their social networks. This then introduces more people to the idea of studying abroad, some of whom will explore the option and choose to study outside of their home country, who will then share their experience with their social networks and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on. It effectively establishes a culture of mobility amongst international students which normalises the process of studying overseas.

There was evidence of the importance of social networks amongst every student who took part in the interviews and focus groups for my research. This suggests that these relationships are critical to mobility. It did not seem to matter where the students came from, or their level of study, social networks were somehow active in all of their decisions’ to study overseas. They had created cultures of mobility for these students which had normalised the process of studying overseas.

My paper on International Student Mobility: The Role of Social Networks is currently online early with Social and Cultural Geography and is available for download here.

References

Urry, J. (2003). Social networks, travel and talk. British Journal of Sociology, 54, 155–175.

Urry, J. (2007). Mobilities. Polity Press: Cambridge.

Why Place Matters: Imaginative Geography and International Student Mobility (My Area Paper)

By Suzanne E. Beech (@suzanneebeech)

A little background…

Over the last ten years (or so) lots of research has looked into why students choose to come to the UK (or go elsewhere), including my own. This isn’t surprising as international students represent a key part of our student body in the UK. In fact during 2012/13 just under 20% of the students studying in UK institutions were non-UK domiciled (i.e. they did not hold a UK passport) (check out the HESA website for more information). International students are important for lots of different reasons but often research has tended to focus on the economic benefits. This isn’t surprising either, in the UK international students from outside of the EU can pay over £30,000 a year in fees (depending on where they study) and can therefore be an important financial support for some universities. However, this is only part of the picture as they can also make significant contributions to the wider economy, in 2012 the University of Exeter, together with Oxford Economics published a report which suggested that the 5,000 international students at the University of Exeter supported some 3,280 jobs throughout the South West of England (see here).

However, it is important to recognise that international students are not only important financially, they are also important culturally. We live in a world where the job market is no longer local, it’s global – so it’s really important that students leave university with an understanding of how to communicate with people from a range of different social and cultural backgrounds, international students provide a way of bridging some of these cross-cultural divides (in an ideal world). All of this means that universities (and you) have a vested interest in supporting the international student community here in Hull or wherever you are!

Imaginative Geographies and International Students

My work has tended to look at the motivations for overseas study and I have recently published a paper in Area on how international students use different imaginative geographies to decide where to study. In a nutshell these imaginative geographies come out of the perceived power relations between two nations. The term was originally proposed by Edward Said in his seminal work of 1978 Orientalism (well worth a read) in which he demonstrated how the West created an imagined, exotic East and how these perceptions spread through literature and art, as well as stories from those who had travelled to these foreign destinations and so on. We still have imaginative geographies today, and they don’t just have to be in terms of the West looking on the East, but rather anything that compares the familiar (‘Ours’) with the unfamiliar (‘Theirs’ or ‘the Other’). Think about it - we are constantly bombarded with information about the ‘Other’ – friends’ holiday photos on Facebook, television programmes which allow us to ‘experience’ somewhere else, books, travel brochures, the incredible wealth of information we can find on the Internet – all without even leaving your home.

So what (imaginative) geographies do we like to send out to our potential international students? The British Council and Education UK are responsible for promoting the UK to prospective international students and on the 28^th September 2012 they published this YouTube video entitled ‘The Adventure of a Lifetime’. 

It follows a typical, female international student who is 'hard-working', 'friendly', 'intelligent' and 'fun-loving' from her arrival in the UK until graduation and all of the experiences she has along the way. It portrays the UK as exciting and diverse, a place where you will get a top-class education, but also have fun along the way. In my opinion one of the most interesting things about the video is the lack of differentiation between different regions in the UK. The British Council is usually good at this, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. The video also does something else that is very important in terms of international students’ imaginative geographies – it reiterates the ideals of academic imperialism. The UK is the place to study.

There are lots of different aspects to imaginative geography, but three in particular matter when it comes to international students:  ideas of power and postcolonialism (academic imperialism comes in here); the importance of community and shared imaginative geographies; and the evidence that imaginative geographies are not necessarily accurate they are, after all, ‘imagined’. To give you an example I will introduce you to one of my research participants, Rafiah (not her real name). She came from Trinidad and Tobago and had chosen to study in Nottingham, she was about 20 when we first met. Rafiah commented that coming from Trinidad and Tobago the UK  had seemed almost “magical”, she felt that people at home sometimes had a bit of an “inferiority complex” and that there is often a real desire to study and live somewhere else. This did not mean that Rafiah did not like her home country, but rather that her schooling, education, upbringing, and so on had encouraged her to think of studying overseas as an important alternative to studying at home. This was something that was common in her home-country, she told me that when people got the opportunity to study overseas they almost always decided to pursue it. So, here we can see how this is reflecting in part those (post)colonial ideals (the UK is better than home) and also how this is also a shared or community process (everyone who can does it). 

However this is really only part of the story, what also matters is whether all those years of dreaming lived up to the reality. Well, Rafiah was more than a little surprised when she arrived in Nottingham – the city was not as she thought it would be. This is not unusual, many international students won’t have visited their universities before they arrive and they can be shocked when they get here. Rafiah had visited London, but she had never been to Nottingham before, and she was taken aback at how different it was to the hustle and bustle that she had experienced in the capital. In fact she had believed that Nottingham would be very like London in some ways, she was a bit disappointed almost that it was a “quiet little place”. This is just one person out of the many that I spoke to, all of them had similar stories to tell – dreaming and imagining their experience was a key part of becoming an international student.

So why does this matter for us? Well, as I mentioned at the beginning, international students are a really important part of our student body. They are a financial asset to the UK’s universities but equally they are a cultural asset as well. It’s important to understand how and why they choose to study overseas and to consider what makes us an attractive destination. So where should our research go from here? I’m currently considering some new research directions, away from international students themselves and towards those who do the recruiting. Understanding how universities and the UK promote themselves will provide greater insights into how they mobilise imaginative geography when selling the ‘place’ of the university. And what about you? Well, research has suggested that contact between international and local or host students is often limited – if you are studying or working ‘at home’ why not try to make some extra efforts to befriend someone from overseas and get to know a bit more of their story.


You can find a link to my paper here:

Beech, S.E. (2014) "Why Place Matters: Imaginative Geography and International Student Mobility" Area, 46(2):170-177.