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This study has three main objectives. The first objective is to examine the nature of an emergent IE industry at a number of different scales and in relation to the strategies and objectives of various institutional actors. Secondly, through in-depth interviews, I explore the motivations and experiences of students who had recently emigrated, often with their families, to Canada for education. The third objective is to understand the motivations and experiences of overseas-educated graduates who had subsequently returned, in this case to Hong Kong, to seek employment. A much fuller discussion of methods and empirical sources of data is provided in the appendix.
A couple of caveats that pertain to the limitations of the study and the extent to which generalisations can be drawn from these accounts need to be mentioned. My sample includes only those graduates who have made the decision to return. Although this seems to be the general trend amongst young Hong Kong immigrants to Canada (see also Kobayashi & Preston, 2007), there will, of course, be graduates who choose to stay.12 My findings are limited in that they only make claims about the value of an overseas degree for those who return to Hong Kong. Different geographies of cultural capital are likely to emerge in different spatial contexts.
A second caveat concerns the very narrow range of careers examined in this study. This range was limited by the employment experiences of my sample of graduates, and although their chosen careers match the career profiles of a larger dataset,13 I consequently am unable to comment on the value of the Canadian education for a broader range of jobs. It is, of course, possible that a local education may be more highly valued in certain other job sectors not encountered in this research. Despite these caveats, the study does provide a unique empirical insight into the processes and practices of internationalisation and transnationalism in relation to education that attempts to understand the wider structural contexts and the motivations and experiences of individual students, graduates, and their families.