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Pursuing doctoral studies in Macau’s private universities: pragmatic motivations and challenging experiences of Guangdong college teachers
Abstract
Purpose
In response to the emergence of a strong cross-border student flow of postgraduate students from mainland China to the Macau Special Administrative Region (Macau), this study examines the motivations and experience of a special group of doctoral students: college teachers working in Guangdong Province and simultaneously pursuing PhD degrees at private universities in Macau.
Design/methodology/approach
Using a qualitative research method, thirteen college teachers were interviewed.
Findings
The research findings reveal their motivations for pursuing doctoral studies in Macau, and the difficulties they faced and gains they obtained from this experience.
Originality/value
All the findings indicate a potential expansion of the role of Macau’s higher education system. Once merely a stepping-stone, it is now an acceleration site for brain circulation between Macau and Guangdong as part of a regionalization strategy for China’s Greater Bay Area.
... This study was conducted in Macau, the Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (SAR), and at the Macau University of Science and Technology in particular. With a population of 649, 023 people (World Population Review, 2020), Macau has 10 reputable institutions of higher education (Higher Education Bureau, 2020) and boasts of academic staff and student population (both local and non-local) with different backgrounds (Shao, 2020;Teo, Zhou, Fan, & Huang, 2019). This notwithstanding, the outbreak of COVID-19 has had a significant impact on the local economy as well as educational institutions with face-to-face teaching and learning activities being suspended at the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak and subsequently switching to virtual platforms such as Zoom, Skype, Google Hangouts among others (Pao, 2020). ...
The inevitable disruptions caused by COVID-19 in the hospitality and tourism education sector have made online learning a necessity rather than an option. This study employs the user experience questionnaire (UEQ) to examine students' online learning experiences specifically in the context of COVID-19. Data collection involved a Qualtrics online survey with a convenience sample of 216 tourism and hospitality students in Macau. Overall, results point to a generally positive appraisal of online attributes, but satisfaction is marginal. Initial principal component factor analysis generated three orthogonal factors of online learning attributes: “Perspicuity and dependability”; “Stimulation and attractiveness”; and “Usability and innovation”. Further regression analysis reveals that “Stimulation and attractiveness” is the strongest predictor of the students’ satisfaction regarding online learning during the COVID-19 disruptions. This novel finding points to the need for hospitality and tourism education institutions to develop an attractive and motivating visual environment for online course delivery since a stimulating online learning atmosphere is crucial in the context of the pedagogical disruptions caused by COVID-19. Nonetheless, these findings are specific to Chinese students and reflect their learning satisfaction which may differ in other contexts.
Over the past few decades, Mainland China has witnessed a massive outflow of students to higher education institutions in Hong Kong. In the context of an up-surge in Mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong, this research aims to explore (1) why Mainland Chinese students choose to study in Hong Kong over other higher education systems, (2) perceptions about the advantages and disadvantages of studying in Hong Kong, and (3) challenges in the process of acculturation from their homeland to Hong Kong. Five key themes are identified: education, finance, learning culture, language, and discrimination/labelling. While Mainland Chinese students often struggle to blend into the new environment, most gradually become accustomed to the local way of life. What remains a challenge is (perceived) discrimination following political tensions over the “one China, two systems” framework. This paper identifies the expectations and dissatisfactions of the participants with regard to studying in Hong Kong, ultimately offering higher-education administrators an insight into how to better cater for the expanding share of Mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong’s universities. This research is significant because it extends the literature by examining acculturation and cultural adaptation issues in an increasingly globalized context.
Internationalisation has been actively pursued by Hong Kong’s universities. Recent years have witnessed quantitative growth in non-local students. To ensure a qualitative success of internationalisation, it is crucial that universities cater for students with diverse academic backgrounds. This research explored challenges to academic adaptation. Focus group interviews were conducted with 124 local, mainland Chinese and international students at four Hong Kong universities. Findings revealed variation in academic adaptation challenges. First, adaptation to an English-medium-of-instruction was a concern for local and mainland Chinese students, while international students noted that limited English proficiency among other students undermined classroom discussions and led to tensions in group projects. Second, local students faced challenges in adapting to a wider range of assessment modes and academic writing, while mainland Chinese and international students reported how teacher-student relations and teaching approaches differed from prior educational experiences. Implications for the delivery of higher education amid internationalisation are discussed.
The present study explores a topic which has been under-studied to date, namely the identity formation of Chinese PhD students in relation to study abroad. Underpinned by Giddens’ ‘reflexive project of the self’, which privileges agency and reflexivity, and using a narrative inquiry approach, it presents four students ‘stories’ collected through semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions. In building a picture of the ways in which students’ self-identity is shaped by and shapes their experience of study abroad, the stories illustrate individual agency, motivation, self-determination and reflexivity. In doing so, they challenge the essentialised view of Chinese students as a homogeneous and sometimes problematic group and point to implications for action by the host institutions.
Recent years have witnessed an increasing number of Mainland students crossing the border to pursue tertiary studies in Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. In contrast to those who have chosen to study in foreign countries, such as United States, United Kingdom or Germany, the Mainland group are studying and living in a society that is both familiar and strange to them due to unique political and sociocultural relationships between Hong Kong and the Mainland. Previous research has mainly focused on Mainland students’ motivations for choosing Hong Kong as their academic destination, but questions as to how they adapt to the university setting and host society have been under-researched. Adopting a qualitative approach, this study reports on the findings of focus groups exploring Mainland students’ adaptation to life and study in Hong Kong. Findings revealed that linguistic adaptation, social network, political identification and discrimination were the most significant acculturative stressors reported by Mainland students. Implications for how Mainland students can best adjust and how universities can better support them are discussed.
To understand the challenges and their causes in interactions between Western supervisors and international doctoral students, we conducted a self-study of our experiences as a Chinese international student and her Dutch supervisor during her doctoral research project. We found the supervisor and the student to differ in their expectations of the learning goals and procedure for the doctoral program. We analyze three types of misunderstandings, regarding how formal the supervision should be, how feedback and assessment should be provided and understood (e.g. strict versus implicit critiques, open praise for excellence versus praise to encourage), and how the student is expected to learn (e.g. expecting answers versus providing questions, learning from modeling versus learning by trial and error). We also illustrate how implicit these misunderstandings were in daily supervision interactions and how deeply they were rooted in the cultural (i.e. power distance, individualism, masculinity, and indulgence) and educational (i.e. education oriented toward qualification versus personal development, level of competition, and degree of teacher regulation) differences between the supervisor and the student.
Higher education in Macau, China, is characterized by vocationalization of institutions, lack of faculty professionalization, and little or no shared governance. Using general statistics of higher education in Macau and a case study of one university, this paper illustrates not only the status of the profession but also the structural, cultural, and individual factors which influence that status. The findings have an important implication for the development of higher education in Macau in the post-colonial era. At a time of universal corporatization and commercialization in higher education, this study explores a challenge that higher education faces everywhere.
In research in cross-cultural psychology, international education is largely understood as an adjustment to host country norms and institutions, a notion that prioritizes social order and stability. The student is seen as in deficit in relation to these norms. The student's home country identity becomes seen as a barrier to be broken down. In contrast, this article sees higher education, and within that international education, as a process of self-formation within conditions of disequilibrium in which student subjects manage their lives reflexively, fashioning their own changing identities, albeit under social circumstances largely beyond their control. International students form their self-trajectories somewhere between home country identity (which continues to evolve in the country of education), host country identity, and a larger set of cosmopolitan options. In piloting their pathways they draw on multiple identities and fashion new forms of hybrid identity. The article highlights the need for international education programs to strengthen the agency freedom of students, and its scope and resources, to facilitate this educational process of self-formation.
Little is known about how a family in the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) makes decisions on cross-border study. International marketers and managers in higher education turn to research based on Chinese student preferences. However, such research ignores cultural traditions steeped in Confucian ideals of family and the subsequent roles and influence of parents. Using surveys and interviews with Chinese students our findings indicate that despite exponential financial and social development in contemporary Chinese society, traditional Confucian values are still largely upheld by parents. The influence of these parents extends beyond initial decision making and impacts on the student’s social and academic well-being. To effectively market, manage and provide academic and welfare support for Chinese students studying across borders requires host universities to develop strategies that acknowledge and demonstrate respect for cultural traditions, parental perspectives and related ongoing influences.
After the political transition in 1999, the economic performance of Macau skyrocketed within a short period of time. Globalisation and the changing political, economic and social landscapes have all exerted influence on higher education. The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of globalisation on public higher education in Macau after the change of sovereignty. The method of study is to analyse facts and figures provided by official sources. Five major dimensions are explored. First, the demand for higher education has increased. Second, government expenditure on higher education has multiplied. Third, the amount of resources coming from the private sector has been boosted. Fourth, the degree of internationalisation has been enhanced. Fifth, there is an aspiration from the government to establish a world class university. In many parts of the world, governments have decreased their expenditure on higher education. In Macau the experience is different. The Macau government generates large amounts of revenue from taxation, and therefore, it is able to increase its investment in higher education. However, it is noted that although educational opportunities are plentiful, distribution of resources is seriously uneven.
This article draws on a longitudinal study of a group of mainland Chinese students’ English learning experiences in an English medium university in Hong Kong, and explores the dynamic nature of their language learning motivation prior to and after their arrival in Hong Kong. The study identified context‐mediated and self‐determined elements in the participants’ learning motivational discourses. The context‐mediated motivational discourses echoed the societal discourses of learning, and were shaped by the contextual conditions on the Chinese mainland and in Hong Kong, including the roles of English, academic competition and medium of instruction. Through an extended socialization process, mediated by various social agents, some of these context‐mediated motivational discourses became internalized and transformed into self‐determined ones among many participants in later stages of their learning. The article argues for an integrated perspective, viewing learner motivation as a dynamic construct emerging from learners’ interaction with contextual conditions.
The two-year longitudinal case study reported in this paper documents a Putonghuaspeaking mainland Chinese undergraduate student's language learning experiences and strategy use in an English-medium university in Hong Kong. Using a sociocultural approach, this paper focuses on three biographical episodes, which recount how the student attempted to create alternative ways of learning and seek new learning opportunities within the learning context, how she came to realise the limitations of her efforts and withdrew from her early active pursuits, and how she followed other mainland Chinese students in memorising words and attached her own meanings to her memorisation efforts. The paper highlights the social, cultural and political aspects of her strategy use and argues that learners' biographical experiences are an important avenue for us to understand learners' strategy use as a complicated phenomenon revealing the interplay between learners' agency and context.
As mainland China opens its doors again to strive for economic development, enormous demands for higher education have arisen.
Many people choose to go abroad for higher education because the domestic higher education supply is still limited and less
competitive than Western universities in some areas. The major destinations include more developed industrialized countries
such as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, the United States, and the United Kingdom (National Education Bureau
of China, 2000). According to Altbach’s (1998) push and pull model of international student mobility, Chinese international
students of earlier times, except for those who received financial assistance from employers or the Chinese government, were
largely pushed by unfavorable conditions in mainland China and pulled by better opportunities in the more developed countries
of the West.
In China’s deepening economic reform, higher education plays a crucial role in social stratification and mobility. External
higher education is both a symbol of cultural capital and a means of fulfilling social mobility. This article examines the
relationship between students’ socioeconomic backgrounds and the opportunities derived from cross-border higher education,
focusing on Mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong and Macau. It shows that students with scholarships come from a range of
social backgrounds, but that fee-paying students are only from relatively prosperous families. Higher education in Hong Kong
and Macau promotes mobility for some, but preserves social stratification for others.
Alors que la réforme économique s’ intensifie en Chine, les études supérieures jouent un rôle crucial dans la stratification
et la mobilité sociales. L’séducation supérieure obtenue à l’étranger constitue un symbole de capital culturel ainsi qu’un
moyen d’acquérir la mobilité sociale. Cet article étudie, chez un groupe d’étudiants de la Chine continentale à Hong Kong
et à Macau, le rapport entre leur milieu socioéconomique et les occasions qui découlent d’une éducation supérieure internationale.
Les résultats indiquent que les étudiants ayant reça des bourses proviennent de divers milieux sociaux, mais que ceux qui
ne sont pas boursiers viennent exclusivement de families relativement aisées. À Hong Kong et à Macau, l’éducation supérieure
facilite la mobilité pour certains; pour d’autres, elle maintient la stratification sociale.
The development of private higher education in Macau has experienced rapid growth in the past two decades. The purpose of
this paper is to understand this trend by investigating the facts and figures supplied by official sources and to analyze
the role between the Government and the private sector. This paper shows that the attitude of the Macau Government is neither
authoritative nor laissez-faire toward private higher education. On the one hand, the Government is investing heavily in the
public sector. On the other hand, it is assisting the private sector by various means. However, there is a lack of systematic
planning in the area of public-private partnership. There are also two issues which may hinder the current development of
private higher education. They are an outdated legal framework and a lack of standardized quality assurance measures.
Keywordsprivate higher education-Macau Government-legal framework-public participation
Mainland China is one of the largest sources of undergraduate and postgraduate students. Previous research has identified the push—pull factors and features that influence a student choice of study abroad destination. This article extends understanding by identifying and examining what 251 mainland Chinese parents and 100 students rated as most and least important when considering study abroad. Findings highlight differences in parent—student ratings of importance and the consequent need for marketers to pay greater attention to cultural values when looking to recruit students from Confucian societies.
The theme of this conference focusses attention on conflict and negotiation. In this paper, I take one example of these issues, and examine the cultural and psychological aspects of these phenomena that take place during the process of acculturation. During acculturation, groups of people and their individual members engage in intercultural contact, producing a potential for conflict, and the need for negotiation in order to achieve outcomes that are adaptive for both parties. Research on aculturation, including acculturation strategies, changes in behaviours, and acculturative stress are reviewed. There are large group and individual differences in how people (in both groups in contact) go about their acculturation (described in terms of the integration, assimilation, separation and marginalisation strategies), in how much stress they experience, and how well they adapt psychologically and socioculturally. Generally, those pursuing the integration strategy experience less stress, and achieve better adaptations than those pursuing marginalisation; the outcomes for those pursuing assimilation and separation experience intermediate levels of stress and adaptation. Implications for public policy and personal orientations towards acculturation are proposed. With respect to the conference theme, since integration requires substantial negotiation, but results in the least conflict, the concepts and findings reviewed here can provide some guidance for the betterment of intercultural relations.
Incl. tables, abstract, bibl. Within the context of broad literature on cross-border flows for higher education, this article examines the distinctive case of mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong and Macau. These territories are a sort of bridge between the fully domestic and the fully international. Hong Kong and Macau higher education plays a dual role, as a destination in itself for higher education and as a stepping-stone for students' further international development. Patterns in Hong Kong are slightly different from those in Macau, and the territories may thus be usefully compared with each other as well as taken as a pair for comparison with other parts of the world. The paper begins by noting the literature on the ways that push and pull factors influence student mobility, and then turns to motivations in pursuit of academic and professional growth, economic benefit, individual internationalisation, and enhanced social status. The paper shows that flows of mainland Chinese students are driven by both excess and differentiated demand. Analysis of the distinctive features of this pair of territories adds to wider conceptual understanding of the nature of cross-border flows for higher education.
Socialization has become a common discourse to view doctoral students' development in long-term academic training. Using this concept and the four-stage model by Stein and Weidman, the research examines the academic socialization of 53 Chinese doctoral students in Germany selected from 8 universities across 7 federal states. A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods has been applied. Findings show that the academic socialization takes place in three aspects of students' life, namely the identification of their doctoral status, the interaction with supervisor and their motivation of doing research. Based on that, the clearness of identification, effectiveness of interaction and steadiness of motivation are displayed as necessary conditions for a comparatively high level of academic socialization in German academic field.
In the former Portuguese colony, Macau, higher education is gaining more importance in the post-1999 era in local talent-building and regional integration to safeguard its socioeconomic sustainability. This paper is based on a recent and ‘innovative’ development in the arena of higher education in the territory, a creation of new space in mainland China for a local public university. By adopting a critical spatial perspective, we examine this idiosyncratic Macau model in three aspects: (1) What kind of power/knowledge production occurs in this new creation of space? (2) How does this new space (re)configure Macau higher education development in both local and global contexts? (3) In what ways does this emergent space re-order the relations between the state, society and school? In employing this spatial stance, we aim to open up understanding of how spatiality affects diverse possibilities in the case of Macau, in global higher education movement more broadly.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine language, academic, social‐cultural and financial adjustments facing mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong.
Design/methodology/approach
The current study employed both quantitative and qualitative methods and included over 300 mainland Chinese students from seven major universities in Hong Kong. In addition to a survey questionnaire, in‐depth interviews were also conducted. Purposive and snowball sampling methods were used to recruit participants.
Findings
The findings indicate that though mainland Chinese students were satisfied with the quality of Hong Kong's higher education, many expressed that they were having language, academic, social and cultural, and financial challenges during their stay in Hong Kong. The results are consistent with the current literature to a large extent with some variations. Few differences were found by gender and between undergraduate and graduate students.
Research limitations/implications
Two thirds of the sample was undergraduate students and only one third graduate students. Future research may want to include an equal number of participants from both groups to get a more balanced view. In addition, since the sample of our sub‐degree students was very small, generalization to this group will be inappropriate. Future studies are needed to explore the unique challenges facing these mainland Chinese students who are pursuing their sub‐degree in Hong Kong.
Originality/value
Most of the current research is limited to mainland Chinese students studying in Western countries, such as the USA, the UK and Australia. Few studies to date examine adjustment problems of mainland Chinese students studying in Hong Kong. There is a need, therefore, to deepen our understanding of the major adjustment issues experienced by these mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong.
The literature on postcolonialism covers a diverse set of geographic areas, cultures, timeframes, and economic and political circumstances. Within the context of this literature, this article focuses on two territories which underwent colonial transition right at the end of the twentieth century, and moved not to sovereignty but to reintegration with their motherland. Language in education systems has long been recognized not only as a very significant indicator of power relations in societies but also as a very important instrument for continuity and/or change. Hong Kong's education sector is a complex arena for language, in which English, Cantonese and Putonghua each play different and changing roles. Macao's education sector has all of these factors plus additional complexities arising from the place of Portuguese. The article notes various paradoxes in the ways that patterns developed in Hong Kong and Macao in the initial postcolonial period. It identifies lessons not only from comparison between Hong Kong and Macao, but also from comparison of experiences in the territories as a pair with experiences in other parts of the world.
Universities in Western countries host a substantial number of international students. These students bring a range of benefits to the host country and in return the students gain higher education. However, the choice to study overseas in Western countries may present many challenges for the international student including the experience of acculturative stress and difficulties with adjustment to the environment of the host country. The present paper provides a review of current acculturation models as applied to international students. Given that these models have typically been empirically tested on migrant and refugee populations only, the review aims to determine the extent to which these models characterise the acculturation experience of international students. Literature pertaining to salient variables from acculturation models was explored including acculturative stressors encountered frequently by international students (e.g., language barriers, educational difficulties, loneliness, discrimination, and practical problems associated with changing environments). Further discussed was the subsequent impact of social support and coping strategies on acculturative stress experienced by international students, and the psychological and sociocultural adaptation of this student group. This review found that the international student literature provides support for some aspects of the acculturation models discussed; however, further investigation of these models is needed to determine their accuracy in describing the acculturation of international students. Additionally, prominent acculturation models portray the host society as an important factor influencing international students’ acculturation, which suggests the need for future intervention.
Incl. abstract and bibl. references Scholars and practitioners have argued that small states are not simply small-scale versions of large states. Rather, small states have distinctive generic features and require distinctive policies. This article focuses on Macau - an autonomous Special Administrative Region within China, and with features comparable to those of small sovereign states. The article shows ways in which Macau's small size shaped higher education in the territory. Small size is not the only determinant of the shape and scale of higher education in Macau. It is nevertheless significant. Through this case study, the article contributes to the broader literature on education in small states.
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Corresponding author Yanju Shao can be contacted at: yjshao@cityu.mo For instructions on how to order reprints of this article
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Corresponding author
Yanju Shao can be contacted at: yjshao@cityu.mo
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