(Self)Confidence or compliance: Students' experience of academic quality in study-abroad contexts

Abstract

This article investigates the views of quality in higher education held by two groups of international students: Chinese students at a Danish university and Danish students at Chinese universities. Given that there are no agreed international 'quality standards' in higher education, we analysed the students' understanding of the 'quality values' of their host institution and their own preferences and priorities. Representatives of the two groups participated in an interview study addressing the experience of academic quality at their study-abroad university. An intriguing trend was identified in the data. Danish students felt confident that they themselves were able to judge the academic quality of programmes, classes and lecturers both at home and abroad. The participating Chinese students tended to express themselves in slightly depreciatory terms regarding the academic quality values of their home universities. Regarding research methods and theoretical knowledge, they adopted the quality values of the Danish host university and referred to these values when evaluating their home universities.

Student-to-Student Diplomacy: Chinese International Students as a Soft-Power Tool

“…This could change as the increasing number of Englishlanguage programmes in Chinese higher education and joint degrees with Western institutions leads to a rapprochement between Chinese and Western academic standards. However, the dominant picture now is that Western students going to China actively choose China because of an interest in the country, while Chinese students often choose Europe due to a general interest in going abroad and travelling and not because of a specific interest in their eventual host country (Hong 2014;Jaeger and Gram 2015).…”