AbstractsEducation Research & Administration

Globalization is regarded as the context and facilitating force for the increasingly enhanced internationalization of higher education around the world. As a response to globalization, the internationalization of higher education takes places in various forms and practices in different countries. In contemporary era, international student mobility is by far the main form of cross-border education in the world. In existing relevant literature, the push and pull model is employed by many researchers as the theoretical framework to investigate the motives of international students, the host countries and higher education institutions. There are approximately three million international students studying outside of their home countries (IEE, 2010). China has become the largest source country of international students among these three-million international students. Most of the study-abroad Chinese students from mainland China went to pursue overseas higher education after 1999 when the Chinese government began to enforce the university expansion policy in mainland China. However, few researchers gave attention to this unprecedented out-going heat among Chinese students in the past decade. The purpose of this study was to investigate the factors inspiring a large number of Chinese students to study abroad after the 1999 reform in the Chinese higher education sector. The push and pull model was employed as the theoretical framework in this study. A semi-structure one-on-one interview was used as the research method to collect inquired information. Nine Chinese international students who are currently studying at the University of British Columbia were recruited as the research participants. The research results show that there are both shared and individual motives inspiring these nine students to decide on undertaking overseas higher education based on their personal academic, economic and social background.