Keele Research Repository

The number of international students coming to the UK to study has increased significantly over the past decade and while much has been written about their recruitment and retention, the development of a deeper understanding of the international student experience is often overlooked.
This thesis does two things; first it critically analyses the policy context and international student experience literature from a theoretical perspective concerned with transitional capital. Secondly, it offers an insight into the diversity of these experiences from the perspective of a particular cohort of international business students at a post 1992 UK university. Drawing on interviews with twelve students at the start and towards the end of their study, it explores how they are negotiating the transaction of different forms of capital during their time in the UK.
The study finds some diversity among this group, but also a consistently complex process of reprioritisation of different forms of capital, with some clear points of imaginative transition and consistent reference to the importance of family expectation and inter-student relations.
The multiple realities that emerge challenge current international student discourses which tend to assume that international students are a homogeneous group. This perspective needs to be revised to take account of the diverse reality and complexity of the international student experience.