This dissertation includes three essays that examine the economics of internationalstudents from three different perspectives in various contexts. The first essay examined the economic (monetary) return of international students who pursue prestigious graduate degrees in the United States. I studied the impact of attending graduate programs at prestigious U.S. institutions on graduates’ earnings for international students in the U.S. labor market. Using a combination of identification strategies including the propensity score matching (PSM) strategy as well as Oster’s (2017) selection on an unobservable approach, I found that international students who have attended graduate programs at more prestigious institutions in the United States have an earning premium of between 19% and 27%, compared with those who attended non-Tier 1 institutions in the United States.
In the second essay, co-authors with X. Y. Ye and S. H. Yang, I investigated the graduateschool choice of a specific group of international students coming from one of the largest international student-sending countries, China (my home country). I provided new evidence on the factors influencing Chinese students’ graduate school choices internationally. I also constructed counterfactual policy simulations by examining what would have happened under different potential scenarios in both China and destination countries. The simulation results showed that the changes in Chinese college quality and family income are likely to affect the number of Chinese students studying abroad but not their distribution patterns among destination countries. In the meanwhile, factors including scholarship opportunities, work visa policies, and recruitment efforts in the destination countries would substantially shift Chinese students’ choice of destination country and, therefore, the specific graduate school location.
The third essay examined whether the enrollment of international students at the graduatelevel impacts the domestic graduate student enrollment in the United States. Using data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from 1998 to 2017 and fixed effects modelling to account for time and institutional trends, I found the enrollment of foreign graduate students crowds in domestic graduate student enrollment rather than displaces it. On average, for every 10% increase of international graduate students, the number of domestic graduate students increases from 1% at non-research universities to approximately 2% at research universities domestic graduate students. The magnitude of impact at research universities reduces as additional state-year and institutional type-year controls are added.
Taken together, the dissertation contributes to the nuanced understanding of the return to studying abroad in the United States for international students, the behind-the-scenes factors that motivate and drive up such behaviors, and finally the impact that international students bring to the U.S. community when it comes to learning opportunities. The implications and ongoing discussions about international students will help further the collaboration agenda between the United States and the rest of the world in higher education.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/41db-yr49 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | He, Haikun |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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