This research is supported by The National Social Science Fund of China (Education) for young scholars (CIA160216).

In the world today, there are 5 million international students studying abroad, including those at the universities in Japan. This research investigates the factors influencing the study abroad decision-making of Chinese international students, based on the results of two surveys and semi-structured interviews. It focuses on the universities’ international environment and overseas publicity. The results were used to test the following hypothesis: “Chinese international students who decide to study in English-speaking countries/regions are more affected by universities’ international environment and overseas publicity than those who decide to study in non-English-speaking countries/ regions, such as Japan.” Sample size emerged as a limitation of this study. Thus, future research should conduct analysis based not only on the “JASSO Study Abroad Fair,” which provided the sample for this study, but also on a variety of study abroad fairs with larger sample sizes.

The purpose of this study is to explore how neoliberal ideas have been institutionally contextualized in Korean and Japanese higher education. As Japan and Korea are both located in Northeast Asia, they have long influenced each other’s society and economics, and higher education is no exception. Since 1990, the governments and universities in Korea and Japan have focused on responding to neoliberalism based on their interpretations of the concept. This study poses the following two research questions, taking the comparative perspective of selective isomorphism. 1) Which phenomena in higher education in Korea and Japan have been affected by neoliberalism? 2) How have neoliberal ideas been institutionalized in higher education institutions in Korea and Japan? This study uses macroscopic and mesoscopic approaches to explain the organizational changes that neoliberalism has triggered, particularly in the management and evaluation of higher education institutions.