This study examines how Chinese international students in Australia navigate the intersection of international education and skilled migration. While scholarship increasingly recognises the entanglement of higher education systems and immigration regimes, students are often portrayed either as passive recipients of structural constraints or as inherently mobile, high- skilled migrants. Less attention has been paid to questioning the why behind their engagement with this education-migration nexus characterised by uncertainty, precarity, and temporality. For international students, why is migration pursued at all, and how are these educational and migrational decisions made and understood? Drawing on 26 semi-structured interviews with Chinese international students, whether or not their degrees enable skills assessment for permanent residency, and whether undertaken as a first or second/third degree in Australia, this study identifies three narrative patterns: (1) migration aspirations emerging during the course of international higher education and adapting to shifting circumstances; (2) strategic pursuit of "migration degrees" while asserting the intrinsic value of these choices to distance themselves from purely instrumental framings; and (3) reframing permanent residency not as a definitive endpoint, but as one possible future among others, without attaching normative hierarchy. Applying the aspiration-capability framework, the study shows how students sustain agency within the education-migration nexus, an agency grounded in comparison and choice, and expressed through temporal fluidity, moral boundary-making, and discourses of flexibility.
Li Zhou (Fri,) studied this question.