Dr Sherrie Lee | Category: international education

International professionals applauding a speaker

For career-changer migrants navigating the gap between their qualifications and the New Zealand labour market — and for the advisors, institutions, and communities who support them

You did not come to New Zealand on a whim.

You spent months — maybe years — researching pathways, weighing up options, talking through the implications with your family. You chose a postgraduate programme strategically, understanding that study was the most viable route toward the life you were building here. You arrived with qualifications, with experience, with drive. And you arrived with a reasonable assumption: that the career you had built in your home country would count for something in this one.

It does count. But perhaps not in the way you expected.

This article is for two audiences. First, the career-changer migrants: mid-career professionals who are using international study as a deliberate migration pathway and want a clearer map of what the New Zealand labour market actually looks for. Second, the career advisors, student services practitioners, and academic staff who support them, and who need better frameworks for the specific and often overlooked challenges this cohort faces.

Because these two conversations belong together. What happens — or fails to happen — in a career advisory session has direct consequences for a real person’s ability to build the life they came here for. Career-changer migrants have made a huge investment of money, time and energy to study, often at postgraduate level, with a clear goal of finding work and settling in their destination of choice — and hope.

The Career Changer in the Room: A Cohort We Rarely Name

Most career support services are designed around a particular image of the international student: someone in their early twenties, fresh from an undergraduate degree, holding three possible futures lightly — return home, stay here, or move to a third country. That image is real for many students.

But it is not the whole picture.

A growing cohort arrives looking very different. They are in their thirties or forties. They have ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty years of professional experience. They are not holding their futures lightly — they have already made the decision. They enrolled in a postgraduate programme because it was the most viable pathway to the permanent residency they are working toward. Study, for them, is not just getting a degree. It is a calculated means to a specific end.

Researchers have named this pattern “edugration” — a deliberate blend of education and migration, where international study becomes a structured, multi-step immigration strategy. A 2024 study of Indian postgraduate students in the United Kingdom found that most participants were using the education pathway as a deliberate entry point to permanent residency, and most were in their late twenties to forties, with significant careers behind them (Udayanga, 2024). New Zealand is not unique in this — but our support systems have not kept pace with it.

If you are that person reading this: you are not unusual. You are part of a well-documented and growing cohort. And the challenges you are encountering are not a reflection of your capability — they are a reflection of a gap between what you were told the pathway would look like, and what it actually requires.

Qualified and Overlooked: Why Overseas Credentials Don’t Travel Well

Aria (a pseudonym) came to New Zealand from India with ten years of human resources experience at several global brands. She had managed recruitment pipelines, led organisational design projects, and navigated large, complex organisations. She enrolled in a postgraduate Master’s programme as her migration strategy — deliberate, planned, well-researched.

And she arrived believing that her experience, combined with a New Zealand qualification, would open doors in the local HR market.

This is an entirely reasonable belief. It is also, in the New Zealand context, incomplete — and that gap between reasonable expectation and local reality is where this cohort most needs support.

A systematic review of 74 studies on international graduate workforce integration found that immigrants’ earnings — particularly those with foreign degrees or who arrived at an older age — are consistently lower than their qualifications predict (Han et al., 2022). A local qualification helps, but even that does not fully close the gap with locally born graduates. Recruitment processes frequently demand the display of cultural capital — a tacit familiarity with local norms, communication styles, and workplace expectations that no overseas role, however senior, can fully provide. Employer bias, often framed as a question of “cultural fit,” operates alongside formal qualifications — and sometimes more powerfully than them.

Critically, credential recognition does not just affect whether you get hired — it affects the quality of what becomes possible once you are. Zikic and Klehe’s (2021) quantitative study of 356 skilled migrants found that when migrants’ credentials were not locally recognised, the positive effects of career planning on employment quality were significantly reduced. Put plainly: it is not only harder to get through the door without recognised credentials — it is harder to plan meaningfully toward the career you actually want once you are inside.

The question New Zealand employers are really asking is not ‘What have you achieved?’ It is ‘Do you understand how we work here, and do you know anyone who can vouch for you?’

This is the credential trap. It catches capable, experienced professionals not because they lack ability, but because they arrive with an incomplete roadmap. Pham et al. (2024) found that international graduates consistently underestimated the importance of social and cultural capital before entering the labour market, only discovering their critical role after failing to secure roles. University programmes — including postgraduate ones — emphasise qualifications and skills. They rarely prepare students for the filters that actually operate in the local labour market.

What New Zealand Employers Are Actually Looking For

New Zealand’s labour market has features that are easy to miss if you have New Zealand’s labour market has features that are easy to miss if you have worked primarily in large multinational environments — even Western ones.

Workplaces here tend to be flat in structure and relationship-driven in culture. Decisions are made through conversation and consensus as much as through hierarchy. Communication is often indirect — understatement and humility are read as positive attributes, not weakness. And community involvement is genuinely woven into how people are assessed: not as a nice-to-have on a CV, but as a signal of character and belonging.

Aria had spent her career in organisations where Western multinationals set the cultural tone. She was fluent in global business English, comfortable with performance frameworks, experienced across cultures. She assumed this would translate. But the specific nuances of New Zealand workplace culture — its particular combination of informality, egalitarianism, and community orientation — was something she had not encountered before. This is not a deficit. It is simply unfamiliarity. And unfamiliarity can be addressed — but only if it is named.

Research on social capital and migrant integration in Aotearoa notes that New Zealand has one of the highest immigration rates in the OECD — nearly 30% of the population is foreign-born — yet the labour market remains deeply relationship-driven (Roskruge & Poot, 2025). Bridging social capital, meaning connections across different groups and communities, is especially important for migrants’ employment outcomes. Bonding capital — connections within your own cultural community — matters for wellbeing, but it is not sufficient for career advancement on its own.

The practical implication of this is significant. Pham (2020) found that 45% of graduates secured their first role through personal introduction — not through formal job applications. For career-changer migrants, this statistic has particular weight: the professional network they spent a decade building is, for most practical purposes, inaccessible from New Zealand. They are not starting from zero in experience. But they are starting from zero in local networks. And local networks and connections are how most people here actually get hired.

The Support Gap: Why Generic Career Advice Isn’t Enough

When Aria came to see me, she expected we would focus on CV formatting and interview technique. She was six months from completing her Master’s and thinking in tactical terms.

What she needed was a different kind of conversation entirely.

Me: “You’ve got great experience, and New Zealand employers will respect that. But what they’re also asking themselves is: does this person understand how things work here? Can they navigate Kiwi workplace culture? Do they have connections in the local community? Those things are harder to show on a CV, which is exactly why we need to start building them now.”

Han et al. (2022) identify this as a meso-level challenge — not a gap in individual capability, but in the institutional and organisational supports surrounding international graduates. Career services may be limited in scope due to resourcing constraints, or oriented toward the local student who is still deciding what to do with their degree. The career-changer migrant — who already knows exactly what they want — needs something different: structured planning support, and quickly.

Zikic and Klehe (2021) found that it is career planning, not career exploration, that predicts employment quality nine months later.Students who moved early into goal-directed planning — a specific target sector, a realistic entry-level role, a timeline, a network-building strategy — achieved significantly better outcomes. The implication is clear: the first advisory conversation with a career-changer migrant should begin shifting them from orientation into planning. For this cohort, open-ended exploration is a luxury they cannot afford.

Research on the education-migration nexus in Australia found that many experienced international student migrants describe their trajectory as resembling an endurance race — requiring sacrifice and resilience they had not anticipated (Tran et al., 2025). Many ended up in roles well below their previous seniority, not through lack of capability, but simply to keep the migration pathway open. This is the predictable shape of a transition that is poorly mapped in advance. Career practitioners who understand this can reframe it as a phase — one with a logic and a timeline — rather than leaving students to encounter it as an unexpected and demoralising surprise.

Volunteering as Community Entry: Building the Network That Gets You Hired

When I told Aria that volunteering should be her immediate priority, she heard it as advice to fill a gap on her CV. I had to reframe it — that volunteering was meaningful way to understand local culture and contribute to a community.

Me: “This isn’t about your CV. You already have plenty for a CV. This is about building the network that will get you introduced to the role you actually want. In New Zealand, that network starts in the community. Volunteering is how you enter communities you’re not yet part of.”

A New Zealand-based longitudinal study by Soltani and Donald (2024) provides a framework for understanding volunteering and community engagement as part of career planning. Their study of postgraduate students — including international students from Asia — found that participation in a landscape of practice: engagement across multiple communities including volunteer organisations, student networks, church groups, and workplace settings, was the primary mechanism through which international students built social and cultural capital simultaneously. International students engaged in significantly more boundary encounters — deliberate crossings into new communities — than their domestic peers, because their existing networks simply did not transfer.

For the career-changer migrant, this is the critical insight: volunteering is not just a a quick way to get local experience. It is the means by which you enter the social fabric that underpins life in New Zealand. ISANA New Zealand notes that community engagement is viewed on CVs here not merely as initiative, but as a signal of cultural integration — of genuine commitment to belonging, not just to working.

Soltani and Donald also found that lecturers and institutional contacts played a bridging role — providing access to professional networks that international students could not yet reach independently. This is why alumni mentoring programmes, employer engagement events, and career expos are not optional extras for this cohort. They are the scaffolding that makes boundary encounters possible before students have built enough local presence to create them on their own.

Practical starting points for career-changer migrants like Aria include the university’s volunteering and leadership programme for students, Volunteer Wellington, and the Yes for Success work experience programme. Student clubs and professional associations offer lower-stakes entry points — places to build intercultural fluency and local presence before taking it into job interviews.

Your Strengths Are Real — Here Is How to Deploy Them

If you are the career-changer migrant reading this, here is what the research — and career practitioners working with this cohort — want you to hear:

You are not starting over. You are carrying a decade or more of professional experience, cross-cultural competence, and the kind of resilience that comes from making a major life transition deliberately and with clear purpose. What changes is not your capability — it is the context in which it needs to be demonstrated, and the strategies needed to activate it.

Zikic and Klehe (2021) found that two personal resources were the strongest predictors of quality employment for skilled migrants: proactivity and social support. Proactivity — the disposition to take initiative, anticipate challenges, act before problems compound — was one of the most powerful factors in their model. If you have built a career across global organisations, you almost certainly have this. The task is to direct it toward the right strategies in the New Zealand context, rather than doubling down on the job application process alone.

Pham et al. (2024) identified six forms of capital that international graduates draw on: human (qualifications and skills), social (networks), cultural (local norms), identity (professional self-concept), psychological (resilience), and agentic — the capacity to develop strategies that effectively mobilise the other five based on one’s background, expertise, and context. The most successful graduates were not those with the strongest qualifications. They were those who understood which capital to activate, and when. The career-changer migrant typically has all six. What they often lack is a clear map of how to deploy them in New Zealand.

Soltani and Donald (2024) add a further dimension: psychological capital and career agency — the growing sense, developed through active community participation, that one has the confidence and capacity to shape one’s own trajectory. For mid-career professionals who have been highly effective in their home context and find themselves suddenly uncertain, this is often the most fragile dimension, and the most important to rebuild. It is restored not through reflection alone, but through action — through showing up, contributing, and being seen.

Rebuilding agency is further supported by intentional support. Pham (2023) found that international graduates who developed stronger employability outcomes were those who engaged in active self-reflection about their cultural backgrounds and strengths — making their identity and psychological capital visible to themselves, and to employers. Career practitioners can create the conditions for that reflection: through structured programmes, mentoring, and coaching that help career-changer migrants name and deploy what they already have, while building the context-specific knowledge the local market requires.

For Aria, that meant being explicit about how to access the alumni mentoring programme and decoding the unwritten rules of networking in New Zealand. For example, attending a career expo was reframed: not as an opportunity to hand out CVs, but as a chance to practise talking to employers about genuine interest in their work and to build the kind of connections that convert, over time, into introductions. As career practitioners, we are building a bridge between the capabilities our students already have and the context they are learning to work within.

The career you want in New Zealand will not come from your CV alone. It will come from the community you build here. That is not a setback — it is an invitation.

For Advisors and Institutions: Five Principles for Supporting This Cohort

The career-changer migrant requires a distinct approach. Not more intensive support — different support. The following principles are drawn from the research and from practice.

1. Name the credential trap early, and name it with care. Many in this cohort arrive with a well-developed but incomplete theory of how their qualifications will translate. Zikic and Klehe (2021) are explicit: migrants need to understand that credential-based entry does not guarantee success, and that their own agency is crucial. This conversation, done well, is one of the most valuable a career advisor can offer. Done too bluntly, it can undermine confidence at a vulnerable moment. The frame matters: this is not bad news about their qualifications — it is important information about how New Zealand works.

2. Move from exploration to structured planning — and do it early. Career exploration alone does not predict employment quality. Career planning does. The first advisory conversation should begin to establish a specific target sector, a realistic entry point, a timeline, and a network-building strategy. Orientation is not enough for this cohort.

3. Reframe volunteering as community entry, not CV building. In New Zealand, community engagement is a structural pathway to the social capital and cultural familiarity that employers screen for. Experienced professionals will take this seriously when it is framed as the deliberate, evidence-based strategy it is — not as a suggestion to fill gaps on a CV.

4. Be the bridge. Soltani and Donald (2024) found that lecturers and institutional contacts play a critical role in providing access to professional networks that international students cannot yet independently reach. Mentoring programmes, alumni connections, and employer engagement are not optional extras for this cohort. They are the scaffolding. Actively connect career-changer migrants to these from the outset.

5. Set honest expectations about the transition. The likely step down in seniority or salary in the first role is real and, in most cases, temporary. Han et al. (2022) note that overeducation experienced as permanent — rather than as a phase — is what damages life satisfaction. Helping students name this as a predictable transition, not a verdict on their worth, requires sensitive and careful reframing — and it is work only a trusted advisor can do.

It Takes a Community

Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a community to support the career-changer migrant in their journey. They have made one of the most significant decisions a person can make — to leave behind a country, a professional network, a social world built over decades, in pursuit of a better life for themselves and their family. More than a CV review, they need a community willing to receive them.

That community is made up of many people, each with a different role. Career advisors who unpack the hidden job market with care. Lecturers who open their networks. Volunteer coordinators who welcome newcomers without requiring existing connections. Employers who understand that cultural fit is something that can be learned, and that the capacity to build it is itself a skill. Alumni who remember what the transition felt like and make themselves available to those who are in the middle of it.

Soltani and Donald’s (2024) research found that what developed students’ employability and psychological wellbeing was not any single programme or intervention. It was the accumulation of boundary encounters — small moments of connection across difference, each one building the familiarity and belonging that eventually becomes, for want of a better word, home. Research cannot mandate those encounters into existence. People do. Institutions do. Communities do.

For the career-changer migrant: your experience matters. Your qualifications matter. And the community you build here will matter most of all. Start building it now — through a volunteer shift, a student club meeting, an alumni coffee, a conversation with a stranger who might become a colleague. The path to the career you came here for runs through people. It is not a detour. It is a map full of possibilities.

For everyone who works alongside them: the village is not a metaphor. It is the job.

References

Han, Y., Gulanowski, D., & Sears, G. J. (2022). International student graduates’ workforce integration: A systematic review. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 86, 163–189. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2021.11.003

ISANA NZ. (n.d.). Encouraging international student engagement with the community. Student Experience Information. https://www.isana.nz/toolkit/student-experience-information/encouraging-international-student-engagement-with-the-community

Pham, T. (2020, July 22). Social capital’s role in graduate employment success – Monash Lens. https://lens.monash.edu/social-capitals-key-role-in-lifting-graduate-employment-outcomes/

Pham, T. (2023). Strategies Undertaken by International Graduates to Negotiate Employability. In Rethinking Graduate Employability in Context (pp. 299–318). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20653-5_14

Pham, T., Soltani, B., & Singh, J. K. N. (2024). Employability capitals as essential resources for employment obtainment and career sustainability of international graduates. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 48(4), 436–448. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2024.2344771

Roskruge, M., & Poot, J. (2025). Evidence of the effects of ethnic diversity, years of residence, and location on migrant bridging, bonding, and linking, social capital: a New Zealand synthesis. Asia-Pacific Journal of Regional Science, 9(3), 831–867. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41685-025-00386-6

Soltani, B., & Donald, W. E. (2024). A landscape of practice approach to enhance employability: insights from domestic and international postgraduates. Higher Education, Skills and Work-Based Learning, 14(6), 1340–1353. https://doi.org/10.1108/heswbl-11-2023-0320

Tran, L. T., Tan, G., Bui, H., & Rahimi, M. (2025). Evolving pathways: From the education-migration nexus to the education-work-migration nexus in Australia. Journal of Sociology, 61(2), 273–290. https://doi.org/10.1177/14407833241311240

Udayanga, S. (2024). Challenges in navigating the education-migration pathways, and subjective well-being of highly educated immigrants: the case of Indian student immigrants in the United Kingdom. Frontiers in Sociology, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2024.1385664

Zikic, J., & Klehe, U. (2021). Going against the grain: The role of skilled migrants’ self‐regulation in finding quality employment. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 42(8), 1023–1041. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2550

Careers / Cross-cultural / international education / Phd / Story

Final Destination: I’ve Found What I’m Looking For

28 October 202110 March 2025admin2 Comments

Seven years ago I made the most significant life decision to date – uprooting my family from Singapore and moving to New Zealand for what many would regard as ‘a better life’. I felt my family was complete with three young children, had an epiphany about doing research and preparing for an academic career in international education, and wanted to start fresh in a new place that would welcome us wholeheartedly, a place we could grow to love, a place we trusted to provide a more equitable future for our family.

Today, seven years after making that decision, I have finally found what I’ve been looking for. 2021 has become the year of the ‘final destination’ not because there’s nowhere else to go from now on, but the culmination of residency, house ownership, established relationships and meaningful employment has marked the end of a seven year journey towards being and feeling settled.

I never thought it would have taken seven years when the typical time was 24 months, at least according to well-meaning advice from the New Zealand government in the form of a settlement curve (Note: While they say it is different for everyone, there’s no other example given). But perhaps those seven years were necessary to build up resilience through struggles of varying depth and emotion, and to fully appreciate the complex feelings and mental state around migration and settlement.

The journey started on shaky ground.

We arrived in Hamilton in late November 2014 close to the start of the summer holidays and were left wondering if we had chosen a ghost town to reside in in the first couple of months. That meant having to do a whole lot of DIY in finding familiar people and networks, much like how we had to figure out how to DIY around the house. You might consider this just an initial blip of an otherwise upward trending settlement experience (again, according to the settlement curve theory). But the experience was more like ‘peaks and troughs’ unevenly spread out, interspersed with flatline day-to-day routine living of school drop-offs and pick-ups, supermarket runs and going to church.

Peaks were often associated with feeling part of the community (whether this was school, work or church) where we could express ourselves without fear of ridicule or suspicion. These were positive outcomes of coming to New Zealand. But the most significant peak was securing sufficiently paid employment that was considered relevant for a residency application. That was the biggest deciding factor for our future in the country after I completed my PhD study. This meant moving from Hamilton to Wellington, and changing my life and career trajectory altogether.

The troughs, in contrast, can be characterised by feelings of rejection by the host country. Rather than singular events, it was the reminders of how Kiwis were largely ‘friendly but not friend making’; efforts to establish personal relationships were either misplaced or flat out unreciprocated. But then again, new friendships in my stage of life – middle-aged with three children turning into teenagers – were going to be far and few between. And so I quietly resigned myself to the temporary friendships with fellow international PhD students for several years. When I started working, navigating collegial relationships in the New Zealand workplace was another new experience to grapple with. I remember having coffee with a new team and feeling like a foreigner all over again with jokes and cultural and sports references zipping past over my head. And during times like these, I would hear the soundtrack playing the song of whether the strange would ever truly become familiar.

Through the seven years of peaks and troughs and flatlines in between, as well as pandemic induced lockdowns and border restrictions, I have learnt how to do more of ‘living in the moment’ – a challenge for someone who thrives on order and being organised. Carpe diem – seize the day – as my 20 year old self would remind me.

I’ve also realised that the initial dream of ‘a better life’ in New Zealand has changed into something else. It has been muted by the reality of creeping housing prices and inflation, petty politics and shortsighted planning. But the desire for a more equitable future for the family is playing out in different ways and unfolding over time. The grass is always greener on the other side, and to New Zealand’s credit, the air is fresher and personal freedoms are greater on this side of the world. Particularly with greater personal freedom, I’ve experienced and achieved a number of things which would have been difficult or impossible if I had remained in Singapore.

Part of the dream of ‘a better life’ was about creating an environment where we could appreciate different worldviews and other cultures while being comfortable with ourselves and others. Today we have the permission to call New Zealand home, a house we own, a community we belong to, new and meaningful friendships, and most recently, landing a job that meets my pragmatic, professional, intellectual and aspirational needs. So in some ways, I’ve fulfilled my dream, but it’s really a dream in progress, working at embracing all of the good, and overcoming the struggles and setbacks.

P.S. The title of this blog post is a response to U2’s song. It has a catchy tune but I’m glad I’m not singing this in my head anymore.

Cross-cultural / Education / Higher Education / international education / Internationalisation

International education – Not just an experience but the possibility of a new life

22 September 202110 March 2025admin1 Comment

I’ve been reading the draft policy statement on high-value international education in New Zealand which aims to define what ‘high value’ means and minimise risks. Reading between the lines, the policy is responding to the growth of ‘low value’ and ‘high risk’ international education in the past decade or longer, most visible in the sub-degree courses with majority international student enrolments, marketed by off-shore agents as study pathways to residency. The message seems to be international education must not be seen as a ticket to residency, or some sort of back-door entry into the land of milk and honey.

Low value, high risk edu-migration

The international students who come through this promised study to residency route may not have optimal attitudes toward study as they have their eye on the prize of migration. But if they’ve been sold a dream, including the ‘package deal’ of work rights as a student, minimum wage, and jobs in demand, then study is really a means to an end – legitimised by a burgeoning edu-migration business and success stories.

The ‘low value’ of this type of international education translates into misaligned academic goals between the institution and student, but actually very high value in terms of international student fees earned, and the investment the student puts towards the edu-migration course of action, with immediate gains for agents. The ‘high risk’ is played out in the over-reliance of institutions on fee-paying students as a business model, blurred lines between legitimate academic programmes and programmes designed to encourage unrealistic study to residence pathways, but more alarmingly, the labour exploitation of international students.

A news report from 2016 illustrates the ‘low value’ and ‘high risk’ type of international education that I’m describing. The focus is on labour exploitation of an international student but the backstory of why and how the student gets to New Zealand, and the survival issues he is constantly facing, demonstrate the tragic consequences of market forces and policy loopholes. Only recently was there a Temporary Migrant Worker Exploitation review which was prompted in part by numerous cases of labour exploitation of international students. This has resulted in new measures of greater compliance and enforcement, but also a practical way-out for those caught in these situations (there’s a new visa to support migrants to leave exploitative situations quickly and remain lawfully in New Zealand).

The new draft policy statement

So it comes as no surprise that the draft policy now refutes the suggestion that international students can take low level courses as a way to gain residency as that ‘weakens the integrity of the immigration system’. Instead, international students should be coming to New Zealand for “high-quality programmes in New Zealand’s areas of excellence”, have sufficient academic ability to succeed, enjoy their educational experience, and then what? With the idea that guaranteed pathways to residency is somewhat reprehensible, we are left to assume that genuine international students who are focused on studying should be expected to leave New Zealand after they finish.

Putting aside the scenario of rogue agents selling the international education residency dream, this expectation seems unrealistic. As a former international student, and having done research in the area and moved in international education circles for several years, there is an implicit if not explicit hope among many students to at least entertain the possibility of making a new life in their destination country. In fact, it is the possibility of working and living in the destination country that makes the country an attractive study destination. The 2019 IDP international student survey results bear out these sentiments, revealing Canada as the most desired destination. This is no surprise given Canada’s immigration policy has been closely linked to international education for many years, with the latest news reiterating and strengthening that stance – a welcome signal for many prospective students across the globe.

Fortunately, the piece on high-value education does not drop the ball on study to residence pathways, but there are clearly favoured groups: i) those in in sub-degree programmes that are linked to domestic labour needs, and ii) post-graduate and professional degree students “who increase New Zealand’s long-term human capital and labour productivity”. So reading between the lines once again, if I’m doing an arts or some non-professional degree or a sub-degree in a subject that has not been classified as meeting domestic needs, I’m not valuable enough to be considered a potential worker or migrant. And I should go home once I’m done with my study.

Looking ahead: Challenges and opportunities

While specific criteria for ‘high-value’ international students may be justified, I wonder if we’re missing out on those ‘undefined’ categories of international students who may be pursuing various areas of interest and who may prove to be just as valuable human capital in the long run. If they are able to find meaningful work in New Zealand after graduation, what’s our attitude towards them? If our population stagnation stats and projections remain true (eg, two-thirds of the country’s regions would be in a state of population stagnation or decline by 2040), then perhaps we should expand our criteria for study to residence pathways, and actually be upfront about study to residence pathways..

More critically, however, international education policies, immigration policies, labour needs, and population trends are so intertwined that they need to work together to inform a robust international education vision and roadmap for the future. No doubt there has been ongoing research attempting to pull together these various strands. Some reports I’ve come across include:

i) Moving places: Destinations and earnings of international graduates published by the Ministry of Education in February 2017

ii) Immigration and Labour Market Outcomes of International Tertiary Students published in March 2018 by the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment

iii) What happens to international students who remain in New Zealand after getting a degree? published in August 2021 by Universities New Zealand

I look forward to reading more about how we can match up international education with growth industries and look further ahead rather than just meeting immediate labour shortage needs.

A ‘high-value international education’ will need to address a range of aspirations held by prospective students. While many international students may only be interested in an overseas education experience and no more, there are just as many, if not more, who are deeply invested in the possibility of study to residence pathways. In both cases, I think demonstrating strong links between a New Zealand education and meaningful work opportunities, whether in New Zealand or elsewhere, is going to be critical. And if we are serious about having international students contribute to our current and future labour needs and population growth, then we need to be fully cognizant of push-pull factors, manage expectations, and think global and long term.

Cross-cultural / Higher Education / international education / international students / Internationalisation

Language rights, agency, and cross-cultural understanding in international education

29 March 201910 March 2025adminLeave a comment

This post was originally written for Ipu Kererū Blog of the New Zealand Association for Research in Education on 4 March 2019. In light of the Christchurch tragedy that took place on 15 March 2019, I’m re-posting it on my own website with a renewed sense of urgency to champion linguistic and cultural diversity.

International Mother Language Day has been observed on 21 February every year since its establishment by the United Nations in 2000. In New Zealand, the day is recognised and celebrated by organisations such as The New Zealand Federation of Multicultural Councils and The Office of Ethnic Communities, as well as schools and universities. In countries with migrant populations, recognising people’s mother tongues or heritage languages upholds respect for linguistic and cultural diversity. According to the UN, International Mother Language Day aims to do just this – to “inspire solidarity based on understanding, tolerance and dialogue.”

Understanding, tolerance and dialogue?

In contrast to the positive messages surrounding International Mother Language Day, the recent debacle at Duke University (North Carolina, USA) over Chinese international students speaking in their native language in the lounge area appears to contravene the very tenets of linguistic diversity. An assistant professor at Duke had emailed all first- and second-year biostatistics graduate students with a message directed at international (and, obviously, Chinese) students. An email excerpt quoted by several news reports reads:

“To international students, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE keep these unintended consequences in mind when you choose to speak in Chinese in the building. I have no idea how hard it has been and still is for you to come to the US and have to learn in a non-native language. As such, I have the upmost [sic] respect for what you are doing. That being said, I encourage you to commit to using English 100% of the time when you are in Hock or any other professional setting.”

The “unintended consequences” the assistant professor mentioned refer to students being disadvantaged during internship and employment opportunities because of the their apparent lack of interest to improve their English. Another possible consequence was that not conversing in a language that others could understand would be considered “impolite”.

A swift apology came from the dean to rectify the matter:

“To be clear: there is absolutely no restriction or limitation on the language you use to converse and communicate with each other. Your career opportunities and recommendations will not in any way be influenced by the language you use outside the classroom.”

The Duke Asian Students Association and the Duke International Association have condemned the discrimination against Chinese students, while external commentators have highlighted how the Duke incident is symptomatic of wider tensions in US academe with regard to international students. Their responses highlight xenophobic sentiments among faculty staff and the institution at large despite the goals of inclusivity and cross-cultural understanding of global higher education. Another point raised is that international students, as with all other students, have personal rights to communicate in the languages of their choice. Furthermore, speaking in one’s native tongue does not indicate a deficiency in English language abilities.

The value of native language use in tertiary settings

My doctoral research on international students’ brokering practices has demonstrated that using one’s native language can be tremendously helpful for succeeding academically. First-year Chinese university students’ help-seeking interactions with peers often utilised Mandarin Chinese, a language they had in common with their academic brokers. Within a shared linguistic and cultural communicative framework, students were empowered to ask a range of questions about assignments, test their assumptions, and occasionally display their epistemic authority. In other words, using one’s native language facilitated learner agency in ways that formal English-medium instruction could not.

The analytical insights on my participants’ brokering interactions were further enhanced by my own bilingual capabilities in English and Chinese. I was consciously engaged in acts of translation between raw data and analysis, but also between my participants’ informal learning experiences in Chinese, and my largely English monolingual readership. In this small way, I, too, wish to “inspire solidarity based on understanding, tolerance and dialogue” about international students in English-dominant universities such as Duke.

Priorities and responsibilities

With international education becoming an increasingly valuable export sector in New Zealand, it’s easy to see international students as cash cows rather than celebrating the linguistic and cultural diversity they represent. If international education is to fulfil the broader aims of global citizenship (as laid out in the NZ government’s long-term international education strategy), there needs to be a two-way street where local staff and students learn from international students as much as international students learn from them. Thus cross-cultural competency training is an urgent need, and so is a re-imagined curriculum that pays more than lip-service to the terms ‘international’ and ‘diversity’. To this end, may I invite multilingual educators and researchers to consider how you can play an important role in bridging cultural worlds.

The original blog post was re-posted with permission and can be found here.

Cross-cultural / Higher Education / international education / international students / Internationalisation / Learning

The ethical challenges of global connectivity – A response to Fazal Rizvi

1 January 201910 March 2025adminLeave a comment

A personal response to the opening keynote by Fazal Rizvi – ‘Global connectivity and its ethical challenges in education’ at the 29th ISANA International Education Association Conference, 5 December 2018, Sydney Masonic Centre, NSW, Australia.

Professor Fazal Rizvi, a name synonymous with ‘cosmopolitan identities’ in international education (see his 2005 paper), presented to international education practitioners, a dilemma in our contemporary times. International education, a notion that implies openness, cooperation, and collaboration, operates in a world that is moving towards ethno-nationalist sentiments.

US President Donal Trump encapsulates such sentiments with his calls for US protectionism, and so do the political landscapes in other countries such as Turkey, Hungary, Italy, Brazil, France, and India. Even while the world is becoming ever more connected, anti-globalisation is gaining traction, revealing the tensions and limitations of so-called ‘global connectivity’. There is a deep-seated fear of the potential loss of national sovereignty in the face of job loss and migrant communities encroaching on the spaces of local populations. On the other hand, globalisation offers little tangible benefit for the every(wo)man, and can be argued to favour the transnational elite, i.e., those who have the resources to engage in, and reap the rewards of, global mobility. Viewed as such, globalisation is, in fact, anti-democratic.

Rizvi invites us to understand the concerns of those against globalisation, and question if the assumptions and charges are valid, and how such perspectives can be harmful and unproductive. He also considers the question if there is really a fundamental binary between globalisation and nationalism. Specifically for international education practitioners, how do we get our students to respond to these competing claims of internationalisation and patriotism. Do these go together in parallel, in dialectical fashion, or can they only exist in conflict?

Rizvi also reminds us that nationalist sentiments are driven by both facts and emotion, and so it is important to address both the politics of global connectivity and affect. International education posits a global village of sorts, but the world as a whole is not a community in any real or concrete sense. He stresses that people are inherently social beings who wish to belong to a tangible and concrete community, and such desires undermine the abstract notions of globalisation.

Rizvi points out some facts of global connectivity:

Our economy has become dependant on global mobility as in tourism, trade, migration, and education.
Growing levels of intercultural exchange are seen in service economics.
Different cultures rub up against one another; ‘cosmopolitan’ cities become so because of tourists and international students.
Even if government policies appear to curb mobility, migrant populations will continue to increase as a result of complex individual choices.

The overriding sentiment towards these facts, however, is one of resentment. If globalisation used to represent some universal moral truth, then it is now up against those who demand specificity in their own moral truths (plural). While Rizvi proposed the concept of cosmopolitan thinking more than 10 years ago, he now recognises the need for new theories. He argues that cosmopolitanism and the associated images of corporations must be resisted as a universal value, but adopted as a way of engaging with everyday issues and conflicts.

Rizvi looks to education as the hope for such cosmopolitan thinking, in view of the failures of media which have become increasingly fractured, and of religion which appears to divide rather than bring people together. Education, and in particular, public education, has a crucial role to play in teaching people how to engage in ethical learning.

He puts forth the need for engaging in cosmopolitan thinking which views social identities as dynamic, and forces us to consider how we can live across differences. Students need to be taught how to be reflexive, that is, to be critically self-referential. We ask questions about why and how we do things, and learn how to work through contradictions. And before we can ask of our students to do so, we ourselves, need to be ethically reflexive practitioners in international education.

What I have summarised above is Rizvi’s call to arms for international education practitioners to recognise the competing forces of globalisation and protectionism, and to actively – reflexively – work against unproductive outcomes. Both intellectually and in practice, I am inspired to take up an ethical response to the current state of affairs. But before I can take on the giants of globalisation and protectionism, I want to respond to a nagging and troubling aspect of international education that is seldom discussed. My troubling thought can be summed up quasi-rhetorically – What is international about international education?

To paraphrase Betty Leask (2009), the presence of international students alone does not internationalise education, or foster intercultural interactions and understanding. To push the point further, using the term ‘international’ or ‘internationalise’ has the grammatical effect of modifying the nature of the noun that follows, but the meaning and significance of ‘international’ is lost in the everyday concerns, both petty and grand, of those who fall under the purview of ‘international education’. The overriding concern for education providers and student consumers alike is ‘return on investment’ (see Altbach & Knight, 2007).

As part of the system of global connectivity, international education is far more valued as a commodity than an opportunity for engaging meaningfully with cultural and social differences. In other words, international education itself is implicated in the unproductive forces of globalisation. Spending three days at the 2018 ISANA conference in Sydney , I observed well-meaning practitioners showcasing ‘best practices’ of meeting the linguistic and cultural needs and demands of students, but rarely highlighting any challenges related to interactions between international students and the host community. Walking around downtown Sydney, one of the leading Australian cities for international students, I saw rows and rows of East Asian shops (food, services, goods) patronised predominantly by East Asians, suggesting to me that at least this group of international students (who form the majority) can remain comfortably in their familiar spaces, without having to entertain the possibility of intercultural engagement.

I have only painted a broad stroke of what can be considered un-international in international education. Addressing learning and living needs, and helping international students adapt to new surroundings, are important responsibilities to be fulfilled by education providers. Often, national grouping of students are helpful (at least initially) to reduce the sense of isolation, and facilitate more efficient communication. However, beyond providing services and opening up ethnic-friendly spaces, there is also a need to proactively bring together different nationalities, including that of the host nation, to engage in conversation, let alone debate, about being ‘international’ and engaging in ‘post-cosmopolitan thinking’. Where there are international gatherings, at least in my own international student experience, they very rarely go beyond differences safe enough to chat over pizza and juice.

There seems to be an ongoing inertia or reluctance to challenge commonly held narratives of internationals (a common nominalisation for international students which is ironically divisive) who haven’t got enough English to save themselves, and need rescuing from their own deficits. My own research has attempted to thwart the deficit narratives by examining how co-ethnic/national interactions enhance informal academic learning through ‘peer brokers’ who are able to translate and interpret the Western/English demands of university curriculum in linguistically and culturally responsive ways. Through such brokering practices, students experience agency in their academic pursuits.

While one of my conclusions is to encourage sociolinguistically compatible interactions for enhancing student agency, another important implication of my research is the role of brokers who straddle two different cultural worlds. How might such individuals be viewed or view themselves as the missing link in intercultural engagement and difficult conversations about living ‘internationally’? Perhaps brokers who can switch between worldviews are potential bridge builders between the ‘internationals’ and ‘others’ / ‘sojourners’ and ‘hosts’, and eventually lead to alternative vocabulary we can use to describe those in and around international education.

If I were to take on that kind of a brokering role, I would start with difficult conversations. To consider how international education can rise up to the challenges globalisation and protectionism, we must firstly reckon with the ironies of, and tensions in, the global industry international education has become. We have to re-consider how ‘English language’ and ‘Western thought’ are both selling points and selling out in becoming global. And this is just the beginning of my ethical response.