Finding agency as a Taiwanese youth: On the cultural capital, social ties, and self-efficacy of Taiwanese prospective international graduate students

This study aims to understand how Taiwanese recent university graduates make academic career decisions through their “bounded rationality” and limited access to information (Spaan & van Naerssen 2018). Further, this study examines how students’ views of their possible futures as migrants are shaped by social pressures to emigrate and by their inventories of migration-supporting social and cultural capitals. Interviews with prospective and current international students, site visits to university campuses and study-abroad agencies, and participatory observation at study-abroad expositions demonstrate that cultural and social capitals influence the migration information sources students access; advisors and consultants in turn constrain the possible migration pathways students pursue. This analysis yields fruitful comparisons to student populations from other highly developed states with now-stagnant economic growth and furthers understanding of how prospective students process news about increasingly onerous visa regimes (Chen et al. 2020) and rising rates of anti-Asian hate crimes (Allen & Ye 2021).