Dr Sherrie Lee | Category: international students

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

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.

Academic Identity / Cross-cultural / Higher Education / international education / international students

Being a Diasporic Academic – Identities in Flux

10 November 201810 March 2025adminLeave a comment

Presentation at the ISANA NZ 2018 Symposium – The International Student Experience: Connecting Research and Practice held on 8 November 2018 at Victoria University of Wellington, Rutherford House, Wellington, New Zealand.

Tēnā koutou. And in the four official languages of my country, Singapore, Good morning, da jia hao, selamat pagi, Vaṇakkam.

I am a PhD candidate, currently awaiting examiners’ feedback on my thesis. I came to New Zealand almost four years ago with my family, with the primary purpose of pursuing PhD study, and with the aspiration of starting life afresh.

Today, I’m not sharing about my research, but about being an international PhD student, or what I have termed, diasporic academic. While I will be drawing from my experiences to unpack what it means to be a diasporic academic, I hope that you, too, can relate to being diasporic academics yourselves.

In the past year or so, I have thought deep and hard about being a diasporic academic. The concept is not mine and I am indebted to Wendy Larner (2015) who introduced this term at a conference keynote several years ago. The concept has also been taken up by other scholars such as Yang and Welch (2010).

As far as definitions go, if you know the meaning of ‘diaspora’ and ‘academic’, you will arrive at a person who has relocated from one country to another, and is based in the host country undertaking some kind of research work. More than physical location, however, is the recognition of diasporic academics’ on-going connections with both home and host, and having the capacity to facilitate international and cross-cultural exchanges.

Diasporic academics manifest themselves in various other terms, such as overseas-born or foreign academics, visiting scholars, or what Larner points out, the new global academic elite who rotates between leading institutions. For example, there is a certain academic who is a Distinguished Professor at Beijing Normal University, China, Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a research professor affiliate at the University of Waikato. With the notion of the elite, also comes the notion of a hierarchy of diasporic academics, from those who are well-established and going around the globe, to those who have just relocated themselves physically – and intellectually. It is those who have just embarked on the journey that I’ll like to turn my attention to – those who move to another country to undertake doctoral study – international PhD students.

Being a Diasporic Academic – Identities in Flux from The Diasporic Academic on Vimeo.

New Zealand is attractive to international doctoral students for a range of reasons, such as full work rights, domestic fees, and hospitable family visa provisions. Partners of international doctoral students are eligible for work visas, and children are enrolled as domestic students, meaning, they do not pay international fees.

Too often, however, international students are perceived to be young and carefree. International doctoral students are typically more mature, have professional experience, and often have other obligations such as caregiving and meeting other needs of their family.

What are their aspirations? They may be here on scholarship given by their home government or host country. New Zealand offers doctoral scholarships such as NZ Aid which aims at capacity building in developing countries. They may be pursuing global careers where a doctoral qualification from NZ may be the link to a job elsewhere. Or they may consider NZ a migration destination for career development, family life, or pursuing a quality of life that safeguards their interests and personal beliefs.

What challenges do they face? Professional identities are often challenged in terms of their legitimacy and relevance in a new environment (Fotovatian & Miller, 2014), whether on the basis of one’s language, accent, colour, or worldview. The manifestation of such tensions can be seen in patronising attitudes towards the non-White, non-native English speaker (Kidman, Manathunga, & Cornforth, 2017).

Those with families face additional stress and need to reckon with transformations in their children and spouses – whether positive or negative (Loveridge, Doyle, & Faamanatu-Eteuati, 2018).

I myself have personally reflected in several of forums about the disinterest from my host community in the ‘others’ (see posts on forming academic networks (Lee, 2018) and the international PhD student experience (Lee, 2017))

What becomes of them at the end of their study? There’s not a whole lot of data on this, but anecdotally speaking, those who return home may be armed with a prized qualification, but little is known about their transnational networks, or what they do with such connections. Those who remain in the country, may not go on to academic jobs, and their career trajectories may be influenced by their partners’ job prospects as well.

I would like to offer a biographical reflection of my own experiences as an international PhD candidate, and share what I have learnt from ‘failures’ and what ‘success’ looks like.

Failure, as you can see, was for me being disconnected from things I so badly wanted to connect with. New Zealand friends, academic networks, professional circles. I think the more disappointing experience was acquainting myself with Kiwis. Conversations rarely progressed on to much else. Our lack of common backgrounds and histories, let alone some kind of ongoing collegial space, made it a seemingly insurmountable task.

My successes as the picture suggests, was building on the invisible but perceptible bonds I shared with fellow diasporic individuals, within and beyond the university. I found kindred spirits at conferences and on social media like Twitter, and we have formed our own networks on the fringes of New Zealand centric ones.

Being diasporic for me had become a valuable resource for personal sense-making. Being the ‘other’ was enough to attract those who were too. But banding together allowed us to understand our peripheral membership in one particular local place, but strengthened our positions as global citizens in connection with one another.

Being diasporic meant I saw myself as a broker between my Southeast Asian worldview, and the views from other places, whether you wish to call it North and South, or East and West. Instead of feeling frustrated by the disconnect, I decided to move on to spaces which allowed me to make connections.

Being diasporic enriched by my research. I wasn’t content to use the theories as they were. I wanted my participants’ non-English words, my out-of-culture interpretation to give life to my analysis.

Recognising the full potential of being a cultural bridge and knowledge broker led me to embrace the identity of a diasporic academic. I am the diasporic academic.

I hope that after my sharing about being diasporic, you will consider being reflexive about your experiences in your academic journey and subsequent career development. Who are you, where are you, why does it matter, what and version of yourself will you be tomorrow?

Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tātou katoa.

References

Fotovatian, S., & Miller, J. (2014). Constructing an institutional identity in university tea rooms: the international PhD student experience. Higher Education Research & Development, 33(2), 286–297. http://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2013.832154

Kidman, J., Manathunga, C., & Cornforth, S. (2017). Intercultural PhD supervision: Exploring the hidden curriculum in a social science faculty doctoral programme. Higher Education Research & Development, 36(6), 1208–1221. http://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2017.1303457

Larner, W. (2015). Globalising knowledge networks: Universities, diaspora strategies, and academic intermediaries. Geoforum, 59, 197–205. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.10.006

Lee, S. (2018, January 23). Being optimistic through academic networks. [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://nzareblog.wordpress.com/2018/01/23/lee-academic-networks/

Lee, S. (2017, December 6). International doctoral students: The potential of diasporic academics. [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://ieknow.com.au/2017/international-doctoral-students/

Loveridge, J., Doyle, S., & Faamanatu-Eteuati, N. (2018). Journeys across educational and cultural borders: international postgraduate students with young children. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 39(3), 333–347. http://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2017.1351867

Yang, R., & Welch, A. R. (2010). Globalisation, transnational academic mobility and the Chinese knowledge diaspora: An Australian case study. Discourse, 31(5). http://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2010.516940

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

International Education – Global Currency or Global Citizenship

7 November 201810 March 2025adminLeave a comment

Presentation at the Global Knowledge Economy Seminar organised by the Postgraduate Students’ Association held at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand, on 15 October 2018

My topic today was New Zealand’s fourth largest export industry in 2016, then valued at more than $4 billion dollars, and supported more than 30 thousand jobs across the country. International education is big business for New Zealand, as it is for the traditional players – the English-speaking nations of the US, Canada, UK, and Australia.

The recent International Education Strategy released by the Ministry of Education has declared is aspirations for international education to be the vehicle for global citizenship. But I do wonder whether the forces of global currency overwhelm such lofty, but certainly important goals.

First, let’s think about why international students come to New Zealand. While the perceived high quality of educational offerings is one factor, research suggests that the stronger factors are:

that New Zealand is overall a more affordable destination, and
New Zealand’s reputation as clean, green, and safe.

Next, let’s consider what international education contributes to New Zealand. As I mentioned earlier, international education is an export sector, meaning, education is treated as a form of goods and services.

Looking at the 2016 stats, there were about 130 thousand international students enrolled in schools, language centres, private institutions, the polytechnics, and universities.

Half of the international students hail from China and India, both emerging middle-income countries and engines of global growth.

Universities take the largest share, hosting a fifth of the international student population, and receiving almost 40% of the tuition income.

This thin slice of statistics reflects what keeps the sector humming along. The sellers – educational institutions – desire income and profit, and the buyers – Asian students – want decent qualifications from an English-speaking country.

You might think that I’ve painted a rather crude picture of international education, but I’ve yet to meet someone who has attributed the $4 billion dollar figure to the desire for world peace.

But even if world peace is not at the forefront or the producers and consumers’ minds, it doesn’t mean that international education is only worth in terms of dollars and cents. It is, after all, not a sector that deals with milk powder or premium beef, but a sector that is capable of transforming lives of all students, the educators, and the community.

The University of Waikato, for example, hosts many nationalities among its students. As an international student myself, I feel privileged to be able to interact with my peers from Vietnam, India, China, Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Tanzania, Nigeria, Vanuatu , Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, Timor Leste. I enjoy learning about their different histories and social customs.

I am beginning to build a global network of friends and colleagues. And while I cannot promise there will be world peace, I can say that I have grown to be more sensitive and appreciative of the different, and at times, conflicting, geopolitics across the world stage. In other words, I am learning how to be a global citizen. I’m not sure whether my Kiwi peers have the same experience, or feel the same way. But the research suggests that they are probably ambivalent or indifferent.

Perhaps Prime Minister Jacinda Arden could offer all of us some inspiration to become more globally minded and action-oriented. In her speech to the United Nations General Assembly, she said, and I quote:

“Given the challenges we face today, and how truly global they are in their nature and impact, the need for collective action and multilateralism has never been clearer.”

PM Arden was talking about climate change. I think the same applies to international education.

The value of international education must not remain solely at the level of trade. It has the enormous potential to build bridges across cultural and political divides. My conclusion is for you to take the first step in making it happen.