Motivations for pursuing postgraduate study in the UK: Perspectives of Chinese graduates of a Sino-British cooperative university

Joining the global trend of internationalisation, higher education in the Chinese context has witnessed remarkable outbound flows of students and a thriving market of transnational education. With China and the UK forging formal arrangements for educational exchange, the UK has become one of the top destinations for Chinese international students and British higher education institutions have been proactively developing partnerships with Chinese institutions. Against this backdrop, this qualitative study examines the motivations of Chinese graduates of a Sino-British cooperative university for pursuing postgraduate study in the UK and the impacts of their previous undergraduate experience on their decision-making. The research reveals novel insights into international students’ study choices and the emerging relationship between student mobility to the UK and the growing availability of transnational education offered by British institutions. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews with ten students who had spent their four undergraduate years in mainland China in a Sino-British university and then chose to enroll in master’s programmes in the UK. The data analysis adopted the Miles and Huberman framework (Miles, Hubermann, & Saldaña, 2013). From the analysis, the research uncovers four common themes in the students’ motivations for doing a master’s degree abroad: academic motives, career development motives, self-formation motives, and the influence of peer norms. The research also discovers five themes in the students’ choice of the UK as the overseas study destination: knowledge and awareness, academic considerations, career development, social environment, and financial cost. Additionally, it is found that the study experience at a SinoBritish cooperative university had a defining influence on the formulation of these two aspects of their motivations. Not only did it inspire the students to pursue higher education abroad for the sake of personal development, but it also contributed to their overwhelming preference for undertaking postgraduate study in the UK.