Why Do Chinese Students Choose To Study For First Degrees In UK Universities - Essay Example

? Why Do Chinese Choose To Study For First Degrees In UK Universities? The task This paper focuses on the prevailing phenomenon of the ever expanding number of people from China who are choosing to pursue their first degrees in UK. It investigates those elements molding the scholars' choice to study in the UK. The study is also aimed at finding out if it is mainly the quest for a value higher training and a longing to enhance their remote dialect aptitudes that create the aforementioned learners to specifically choose the UK universities for their first degrees. UK degrees are perceived to have greater career value than those offered in Chinese universities (Agelasto, 2001). Research question Why do Chinese students choose to study for first degrees in UK universities? Background This research study will basically involve the global expansion of Chinese students studying at UK universities. There has been declaration of policies in the UK for the expansion of both the absolute numbers of foreign students and their share of this huge Chinese market. Mainland China has been the largest component of this growth in the UK. Currently, they are by far the largest national group of overseas students in the UK, with numbers increasing by a factor of almost twenty over the ten years from 1994/5 to 2004/5. This study will focus on Chinese undergraduates, for whom the growth in numbers has been particularly marked – from 245 to 20,820 in that ten-year period (Denscombe, 2010). These Chinese students comprise of a major input generally to the UK economy and particularly to the financial health of universities. Strategies for the expansion of the market share will benefit from a vivid understanding of the kind of demand and the customers in the market. There have been no detailed studies assessing the relevance of various factors believed to influence students’ decisions to study abroad. The minute number of studies of foreign students’ motivations generally incorporate this ‘identification of factors’ approach, although they tend to focus on the characteristics of the host country (UK) and universities rather than the Chinese students themselves. While identifying and ranking these factors for Chinese foreign students, this study will also contextualize and develop our understanding of the processes which are involved in individuals’ decision-making (Agelasto, 2001). Other information The Chinese students’ decisions to study in the UK however, should be understood based on the relevant conditions in the home country, which will include the various university options available there. This study therefore will also briefly include Chinese students who have opted to study at their local universities, so as to have a whole picture of the involved decision-making process and its theorization. Two broad theoretical positions have been used to account for developments in patterns of educational enrolment and the choices that lie behind them: human capital theory and positional competition theory. The former argues that expansion of demand for education reflects increases in the skill levels demanded by the economy, with increasing components of technical and scientific knowledge that require longer periods of more advanced education and training, precisely the situation in contemporary China, and the basis of the policy of ‘massification’ of higher education. Rates of return on educational investment can be calculated and it is these that motivate social and individual decisions to invest in education (Hechanova-Alampay et al., 2002). Positional competition theory on the other hand, argues that the expansion of educational demand at increasingly higher levels of the system, as currently experienced in China, is the outcome of competition to increase one’s educational standing relative to others. The labor market and education relationship is not one of providing necessary technical skills, but one which is mediated by the use of credentials as a screening device by employers (Heggins and Jackson, 2003). Resultant credential inflation intensifies competition for credentials from elite institutions and may promote the development of a hierarchy of universities, at least in popular perceptions. Within China, such a hierarchy is enshrined in the university selection process itself, but we have largely only anecdotal evidence about perceptions of a global hierarchy among Chinese students and how it may affect their choices. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that studying overseas may have as much to do with the perceived difficulty of getting into Chinese universities as it has notions of a global hierarchy (Chan, 2001). Conditions and recent events within China give the study wider relevance in relation to currently dominant theoretical positions: The globally unparalleled economic growth in China sets up precisely the situation in which human capital theory makes its strongest explanatory and policy-directing claims. The drive towards massification of higher education produces a situation in which theories of positional competition and credential inflation should be most applicable. The opening up of China to the outside world, coupled with increased opportunities for Chinese students to study abroad, offers the opportunity to test claims relating to the globalization of positional competition and perceptions of a global hierarchy of universities and credentials. The rapid social changes taking place within Chinese society, in particular the emergence of new bases for social stratification and opportunities for increased social mobility provide an opportunity to re-examine social class-based analyses of educational choices in what can be seen as ‘critical’ conditions. The proposed study will look at the explanatory value of each of these theoretical approaches in accounting for the reasoning behind university choices made by Chinese students. Unfortunately, both human capital and positional competition theories in themselves tend to remain focused at the macro-sociological level. The micro-foundations of the phenomena with which they deal with, commonly remain implicit and less commonly subjected to empirical investigation (Hervik, 2004). Within human capital approaches, patterns of educational enrolment are seen as the cumulative effect of myriad individual decisions based on rational evaluations of the individual economic returns likely to accrue from those decisions. Based on this view, we have the rational action theory (RAT). We also have the ‘habitus’ concept. However, it is not clear how applicable this concept might be in the rapidly changing social class structures of contemporary China, which are still emerging and highly uncertain. Therefore, contemporary Chinese society should be treated as an interesting ‘critical case’ when it comes to Bourdieurian approaches. The study will therefore offer opportunities for useful comparison with the work of Cunzhen & Trevor (2004) and others, in a very different sociocultural context. Time Line 1st Day 1. Manual reading and re-reading 2. Contacting relevant societies and student bodies so as to get the permission for conducting the survey 3. Make critical emphasis on the incentive details when contacting the students to be interviewed in the survey. To enable them give you critical information; don’t give them all the survey details early. 2nd Day 4. Printing of the relevant questionnaires after checking and proof-reading 5. Ensuring that all the relevant equipments are available on the data collection and analysis days. 6. Requesting the head department to provide relevant equipments and stationery for the study. 3rd-5th Day 7. Confirmation of the place of meeting and then after the confirmation, marking it on your diary. 8. Collection of secondary data or materials, taking the critical information from the materials, which is relevant to your research 9. Notify the teacher of your course regarding your plan, and give a brief detail to her or him. Afterwards, give extensive details to the people involved and remain in close contact with the head department. 6th -10th Day 10. Conducting the surveys from the participants after meeting them. 11th-13th Day 11. Data entry and tabulation/analysis after the collection 12. Complete or full data analysis, arranging the study results in very simple graphs and tables in a way that they can be easily understood by people who are not experts in research. 14th-15th Day 13. Preparation of the study results ready for presentation to the target audience. 14. Submitting the complete report to the instructor or relevant person. 15. Thanking the participants for their cooperation, and providing them with the incentives you promised them accordingly. Questions to be covered in the questionnaire The following questions will be sought to be answered by the study: 1) What are the factors taken into account by Chinese students making university choices with the aim of going to the UK universities, and how the prioritization of these factors correlates with aspects of their background and their socio-economic perceptions and opportunities? 2) What support does the prioritization of factors by Chinese students lend to human capital and positional competition theories as explanations of UK university enrolment patterns? 3) What is the nature of the decision-making process behind the UK university choice made by Chinese students, and what are the influences on this process? 4) How well do rational action theory and social reproduction theories account for this decision-making process? Conduct A questionnaire should not be judged to be the most appropriate means for gathering data for such a test, and it should always be intended that the qualitative data from the interviews would provide the level of insight into decision making processes that are required for a satisfactory judgment (Kher et al., 2003). The difficulties and even the usefulness of trying to determine some sort of cooperation between data and theory are expected in the research design. However, RQ4 will in fact be largely interpreted in terms of the relevance of theories of Western origin to the Chinese. That is, an investigation of the contextual validity of various sociological theories, which is one of the key aims of this research (Gearon, 2002). In painting a picture of the factors which lead to Chinese students choosing UK universities, you have to deal with both common and specific concerns (Klineberg and Hull, 1979). In order to guarantee that British colleges support their allotment of the China business sector, it is vital to address their needs in a holistic manner. The emotional and physical well being of students has far reaching influence for their academic choice of institutions which influences their performance. The UK needs to distinguish that Chinese people offer one another gigantic social, zealous and pragmatic backing when powerless, achy to go home and battling to conform to the nature's turf (Staples, 2008). For their part, Chinese students need to recognize which aspects of their behavior are liable to be recognized adversely in a British scenario. It is not an inquiry of endorsing such conduct, but of recognizing procedures (Knight, 2003). This enhances their good relations and recommendations with the UK universities, thus contributing to the increasing choice of the Chinese to come to study in the UK. The work of International Offices can usefully expand beyond recruitment to information sharing with the larger student body and with university teachers and administrators (Lane, 2002). Chinese personnel are critical in such a process. The bicultural and clear consciousness by Chinese who have at any rate existed in the UK permits them to serve as an exceptionally successful extension between Chinese people and the educators and scholars in UK (Staples, 2008). Method Two student constituencies will form the target population of Chinese students in UK Universities. The population should be restricted to students in the first years, based on the assumption that their recollections of relevant decision making would be more recent, therefore more reliable (Lee, 2005). In China, two cities were targeted: Beijing and Shanghai. These cities allowed the inclusion in the study of the most prestigious of Chinese universities. They are of further interest in the light of a study of Chinese overseas students in the 1980s, which revealed differences between student attitudes in Beijing and Shanghai, reflecting the greater ‘politicization’ of the former and greater economic opportunity of the latter. In Shanghai, two universities should be selected – an elite institution and another one which is not. In Beijing, a third university, a little below the highest rank will be included (Levin, 2002). A quantitative approach was used initially to establish macro-level descriptions of influential factors, their relative priorities and how these relate to various individual background factors. Qualitative data will then be obtained from multiple case studies from the two student constituencies that are being investigated (Giddens & Griffiths, 2006). Rationale for the questions RQ 1 should be interpreted primarily as one requiring a quantitative description and should therefore be addressed using questionnaires. Correlations with certain aspects of the students’ backgrounds will have to be calculated using these data, but with limitations that are discussed below when presenting the results. RQ 2 will be addressed in the initial stages through the questionnaire, which will allow the generation of descriptive patterns to test against the two identified theoretical positions, but the qualitative interview data will be required to make sense of these patterns. Although RQ 3 will be addressed through descriptive statistics from the questionnaire data, it will always be expected that qualitative data from interviews would give the level of insight that was necessary to understand the processes involved RQ 4 embodies the most complex of the research aims, since it will demand judgments about the extent of the match between theory and data. Results Quantitative data collection and analysis Questionnaires will be developed for each of the two target groups through an initial process of literature analysis, drawing on our own experience and that of UK and Chinese colleagues as well as informal interviews with a small number of students from both of the countries. You should formulate two questionnaires to allow comparison on core issues, with the wording of these items adapted where necessary for the two constituencies, and alternative items will be inserted to meet their particularized circumstances. Questionnaires should be drawn up in English (Li and Kaye, 1998). Piloting and revision will be carried out for the questionnaires for the Chinese students in the UK. The questionnaires should be composed mainly of closed items and focused on the following issues: Personal and family background Factors that influenced the decision to go to university, to study abroad in the UK and the choice of the particular university. Personal aspirations and perceptions of opportunities available in the UK, including perceptions of the labor market together with the sources of advantage therein. Identification of universities and students for the questionnaires will rely heavily on contacts and connections. This approach pervades almost all activities in China and is widely known and accepted as the best route to the successful achievement. Contacts will have to be sufficiently wide and diverse in order to ensure you obtain a sample of students which represents a range of university types and courses, and observe gender-balance. Paper questionnaires will be distributed during class time, thus ensuring a 100% return, my target questionnaires being at least 400 per university. Accessing students at UK universities will be easier as is originally anticipated. I will use a web-based version of the questionnaire and explain it to first-year Chinese students in as many universities as possible, covering a wide range in the university rankings (Lowe, 2007). You should telephone the Universities and ask them to circulate an e-mail to the target population. Some universities agreed, and therefore it will be able to contact the students more or less efficiently; although there will be those who will agree but then not act; there will be those who will feel unable to effectively participate for a variety of reasons, and even some universities might refuse and offer no reason. Other strategies should also be tried in order to increase access. This could be by contacting Chinese Student Societies and using personal contacts. In the end, I have estimated to come up with 800 usable responses from 400 female and 400 male students in at least 5 universities, 3 in the UK and 2 in China. Data will be entered into SPSS for frequency, cross-tabulations and co relational analysis (Machin & Vignoles, 2005). Future Research Priorities The research findings should highlight the value of seeking a better understanding of the relationships between education and socio-economic change in contemporary China. This research’s main interest here lies in focusing on those privileged to study in the UK in particular, and the role that education may be playing in changing or reinforcing their position in society. There should be an involvement with potential research partners in China. They include sociologists and economists, as well as those working in educational research. Another priority is to examine the experiences of Chinese students in UK universities, beyond the first-year accounts, which will be gathered in this research. This study would then be located in the discourse on the internationalization of universities, particularly while looking at the fit between university rhetoric, so as to offer an internationalizing educational overview experience and the experiences of the Chinese students in the UK universities (Robson, 2011). This should also be embarked upon through follow-up interviews with some of the students in this initial study, and should be complemented by highly detailed and sensitive research being carried out here into the experiences of Chinese postgraduate students in the UK (Staples, 2008). References Agelasto, M., 2001. University in Turmoil: The Political Economy of Shenzhen University. Hong Kong: Grin Vealag. Agelasto, M., 2001. Educational Disengagement: Undermining Academic Quality at a Chinese University. Hong Kong: Grin Vealag. Chan, L., 2001. Marketization of higher education in China: implications for national development dissertation University of Hong Kong. London: Sage. 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College Student Journal 37(4), 564– 569. Klineberg, O., and Hull, W. F., 1979. At a Foreign University: An International Study of Adaptation and Coping. New York: Praeger. Knight, J., 2003. Updated internationalization definition. International Higher Education, 33 (3), 2–3. Lane, K., 2002. So where are you from? Community College Week, 16 (22), 6–9. Lee, J. J., 2005. Experiences and satisfaction among international students. Paper presented at the meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Canada: Montreal. Levin, J. S., 2002. Global culture and the community college. Community College Journal of Research and Practice, 26, 121–145. Li, R. Y. and Kaye, M., 1998. Understanding overseas students’ concerns and Problems. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 20 (1), 41–50. Lowe, J., 2007. Decision Making by Chinese Students Choosing UK and Chinese Universities. Swindon: ESRC. Machin, S., & Vignoles, A., 2005. What's The Good Of Education? The Economics of Education in the UK. London: Princeton University Press. Robson, C., 2011. Real World Research. Oxford: Blackwell. Staples, N., 2008. Early Childhood Education: An International Encyclopedia IV. New York: Routledge. Read More