The geographies of higher education mobility : how international students choose where to study

• Main Author: Beech, Suzanne Elizabeth
• Published: Queen's University Belfast 2013
• Subjects: 378.0162
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.600000

This thesis analyses the factors involved in influencing the mobility of tertiary level international students studying in the UK. While student mobility has gained prominence within academia in recent years, hitherto there has been no attempt at comparing the experiences at different UK universities. To this end, this thesis compares the University of Aberdeen, the University of Nottingham and Queen's University Belfast, three 'competitor' universities in different parts of the UK. This research employs a mixed methodology approach, encompassing an online survey, one-on-one and paired interviews and focus groups of international students - and staff - at the study universities. In so doing, it not only integrates data from a range of different sources, leading to a richer data set overall, but it also assesses the effectiveness of working with these methods. The research shows that student decision making in choosing where to study overseas is richly multifaceted, and at anyone time students act under the influence of competing and even apparently contradictory stimuli. While students are consumers of higher education and therefore seek out degrees that will lead to the best job prospects, have the most suitable course programmes, or the best value for money, it is shown that they are also governed by their imaginative geographies of the place, and the advice of their social networks. Their chosen university is therefore frequently one that not only meets their demands as consumers, but that will also ensure their emotional wellbeing, as filtered through theirs and other geographical perceptions