Chinese Ph.D. students on exchange in European Union countries: experiences and benefits

ABSTRACT

In the past decade, thousands of Chinese doctoral students received funding from the China Scholarship Council (CSC) to start a 1–2-year exchange study in European universities. Do these Chinese doctoral students significantly improve their academic skills and publications through such an overseas experience? What are the influencing factors for them to receive such benefits? Through a large-scale investigation, we confirmed the expectation that Chinese doctoral students did indeed receive benefits from these study abroad experiences in Europe, and identified several critical factors such as advisor and institution ranking for them to receive such benefits. These results confirmed our expectation that the advisor is the most important factor contributing to a successful abroad studying experience; such a conclusion is of important policy implications that CSC shall pay more attention to exchange Ph.D. students’ collaborative supervisor and his/her research team.

KEYWORDS:

• Doctoral exchange students
• Chinese students
• European Union

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on the contributor

Wen-Qin Shen is an associate professor at the School of Education, Peking University, who received his Ph.D. degree from Peking University.

Dong Liu is an assistant professor at Department of Psychology, Renmin University of China, who received his Ph.D. degree in Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Hongjie Chen is professor of higher education in Peking University.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 71673005].