Let’s test the employability claims joint universities make

International higher education, including transnational education (TNE), which features not only the mobility of students and faculty but also the mobility of programmes and institutions, has rapidly developed and expanded since the beginning of the 21st century.

Recent global situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, geopolitical tensions and the Sino-US trade war and decoupling, however, have posed challenges to international education as a whole.

Regarding TNE in the Chinese context, for instance, the University of Michigan announced in January it would end its 20-year well-established joint institute with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, sparking concerns over growing decoupling in the higher education sector.

Yet, the Chinese government keeps emphasising the importance of opening up education, aiming to cultivate top talents and enhance the international competitiveness of Chinese education.

Amid this turbulent and complex reality, it is getting increasingly important for people to reconsider the gains and benefits of international higher education.

What are the values of TNE or international joint universities and programmes beyond the double degree?

What do they deliver in terms of talent cultivation and skills development?

Benefits to students

Sino-foreign joint universities claim to provide students with intense international and intercultural experiences, which are expected to bring various benefits to students in personal and employability development.

The homepage of the official website of Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, one of the earliest founded Sino-UK joint universities, prominently displays the motto: “The Future of Education – We help you develop into a global citizen with the skills, knowledge, abilities, temperament and tenacity to succeed in today’s competitive and fast-changing world”, perfectly highlighting its educational objectives and advantages.

However, are these expected outcomes and potential advantages true?

During my postgraduate studies in the UK, I encountered a cohort of Chinese graduates from joint universities who left a lasting impression on their peers due to their exceptional English language proficiency, intercultural communication skills and leadership.

This trend appears to align with the expectations often associated with graduates from joint universities, but is this experience consistent across all joint universities or TNE graduates? And is it related to their international experiences in joint universities?

Research project

These questions stimulated my curiosity, prompting me, as a student from an elite local Chinese university, to explore the role played by joint universities in cultivating global competencies and job-related qualities.

This topic is also worth attention since graduate employability has come under the spotlight in the Chinese context in recent years as youth underemployment and degree inflation (neijuan in Chinese) have become serious issues.

Therefore, I conducted a mixed-methods research project, collecting quantitative and qualitative data from recent Chinese graduates from Sino-UK joint universities to explore their employability and the underlying relationship with their various types of international experiences at joint universities.

In addition to graduates from the joint universities, a group of graduates from one Chinese domestic university at the same academic level also participated in the survey in order to provide a comparative analysis of their self-assessed employability skill levels.

These were the questions I was trying to find answers to:

1. Are the graduates from joint universities advantaged in terms of perceived employability compared with their peers from a local Chinese university?

2. How does an international experience at joint universities contribute to discernible differences?

Mixed findings

The research results demonstrated mixed findings. The quantitative findings from the survey questionnaire initially found that, compared to their local peers, graduates from Sino-UK joint universities had greater levels of different, self-assessed employability skills several years after graduation.

The biggest advantages they had were in their self-confidence, communication and interpersonal skills, cross-cultural understanding and English competence.

Additionally, all types of international experiences, especially intercultural communication activities, were important in enhancing graduates’ self-reported employability abilities.

These results, although they did not represent all the students at joint universities, did help to provide some evidence of the existing and potential benefits of international joint universities on students’ and graduates’ skills development.

However, it is also necessary to acknowledge that the high rating of graduates from joint universities could be due to other factors. For instance, it is plausible that their superiority compared to local peers existed before they attended university.

Although this research tried to control for prior academic performance between the two groups of graduates, different factors, such as graduates’ gaokao location and personal backgrounds, may still lead to a difference in employability skills.

The interview provided different and more profound insights, complementing the quantitative results. For example, graduates reflected that English proficiency was strongly enhanced through immersion in the full-English international environment and preliminary language training.

By contrast, the degree of growth in cross-cultural competences, which are also valuable in the workplace, was questioned.

Although graduates enjoyed rich intercultural activities, such as international voluntary programmes and societies, where they could meet international friends, many of them did not form or maintain real friendships and connections with international students, thus missing the opportunities to develop deep and solid cross-cultural communication skills which could later be applied in the workplace.

Taken together, these results not only offer policy implications for the long-term development of intercultural competences and other job-related skills within international joint universities but also critically emphasise discussions around the actual delivery of the international higher education and TNE programmes.

Are these programmes and institutions genuinely enhancing students’ essential skills and increasing the added value of higher education, or are they merely providing superficial international exposure at a surface level?

Anan Chen is an early-career researcher in the UK and China, focusing on international higher education. She holds a PhD in comparative and international higher education at the Institute of Education, UCL. Her main research interests include transnational education (TNE), Sino-foreign international collaboration, graduate employability, labour market outcomes and talent cultivation. As the founder of UCL Global Education Association (UGEA), she is also actively fostering international and interdisciplinary communication among students, scholars and the education industry.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.