Abstract
The last decade has seen the rise of literature focused on the rapid expansion of international students in higher education globally and the growing policy discourse around improving graduate employability. However, both, inevitably, have limitations. Together, they tend to homogenise international learners and see them narrowly as simply economic actors. More recently, however, there have been signs of important new developments in both literatures, drawing on interactive employability and capability accounts that stress both agency and structure in more satisfactory ways. We seek to further the development of an account that bridges the new wave of student mobility research and capability–employability research. In doing so, we offer two further elements to the literature. First, we aim to bridge the gap between accounts of international higher education and those of migration and diasporic studies. Second, we deliberately focus on a group that is marginal to the mainstream discourse but who are migrants that have engaged in international higher education in order to improve their labour market prospects, amongst other motivations. We do this through examining the stories of five Zimbabweans who embarked on additional higher educational studies in England after migrating to the country. Through this unique approach, we offer an important new perspective on how the debates on international higher education, employability and migration can be taken forward through closer articulation between these accounts.
Highlights
The last decade has seen the rise of literatures that have focused on the rapid expansion of the numbers of international students in higher education globally and the growing policy discourse around improving graduate employability
They tend to homogenise international learners into an ideal student who is young and who is attracted to international higher education as a human capital investment
The choice of focus on Zimbabwean highly skilled migrants returning to higher education was motivated by a concern with the limitations of the typical case of the international higher education student
Summary
The last decade has seen the rise of literatures that have focused on the rapid expansion of the numbers of international students in higher education globally and the growing policy discourse around improving graduate employability. This is important for, as Appadurai argues, poverty tends to result in ‘more brittle horizon of aspirations’ (Appadurai 2004, 69) for individuals and communities so that they cannot imagine, let alone achieve, what might be possible in other circumstances Through drawing on these theoretical resources, we see our informants not as consumers of international higher education and investors in their own human capital, but as multidimensional human beings with complex and fallible life projects that are shaped both by their agency and by their experiences and perceptions of structure (cf Powell and McGrath 2014). Vertovec notes how some such networks can lead to new migrants becoming trapped in ‘a limiting ethnic niche occupation or domain’ (Vertovec 2002, 5) which can lead to downward occupational trajectories
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