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Despite a range of internationalisation efforts at the government and institutional levels, Vietnam remains on the periphery of the existing scholarship on international education, especially inbound mobility. Drawing on interviews with 38 participants, this article provides insights into how Australian students arrive at a comparative, international perspective in their field of study and develop Vietnamese cultural literacy during their short-term mobility to Vietnam. The study also brings to the fore the hindrances, in particular language barrier, facing Australian students in mobility programs. The article points out how the New Colombo Plan can play an important role in raising the awareness of the value of learning an Asian language like Vietnamese and enriching Vietnamese cultural literacy among young Australians. It concludes with practical recommendations for incorporating the development of regional languages and cultural literacy in learning abroad programs.

While aggression is considered as one of the most common behavior problems among adolescents, empathy can be a predictor of prosocial behaviors and underlines different implications for aggression in children. Empirical studies had proved that there was a negative correlation between empathy and aggression in children and adolescents. Nevertheless, the vast majority of studies on the relationship between aggression and empathy has been well documented in the literature with Western samples. The current study aims to examine the aggression-empathy association in Vietnamese adolescents and to explore whether or not aggression can be predicted by empathy and self-control. A total of 1,236 adolescents aged 12-13 years from 3 regions of Vietnam were asked to answer the survey package including the Reactive and Proactive Aggression Questionnaire, the Basic Empathy Scale and the Self-Control Questionnaire. Findings revealed that there was a statistically significant difference in aggression and empathy scores for gender, in which female adolescents showed a higher level of aggression and empathy than that of male ones. There was a strong negative relationship between aggression and empathy. Aggression can be predicted by empathy and self-control. Of the two variables, empathy was a better predictor of aggression (beta = -0.42) than self-control (beta = -0.37). The results add more valuable evidence to the existing literature on the relationship between aggression and empathy in a diverse population, and proved the role of education in enhancing empathy for adolescents in general and those with high levels of aggression in particular in school settings.

The Australian government has considered youth mobility to the Indo-Pacific to be crucial in building Australia's connection with the region. Despite a growing trend of Australian student mobility to the Indo-Pacific, there has been a dearth of research on mobility youth's agency in public diplomacy. This article makes an original contribution to the literature by elucidating the four main forms of youth agency in public diplomacy in which Australian students have engaged: fostering regional understandings, people-to-people connections, people-to-opportunity connections and country-to-country connections with the Indo-Pacific. It shows that these understandings and connections were created not only during the students' in-country experiences but also upon their return, and the youth-led connections are not limited within the host and home countries. The article suggests a critical need to have a systemic approach to supporting mobility youth's capacity for regional engagement, beyond the traditional student experience in learning abroad, which is concerned largely with academic outcomes, cultural enhancement and employability development.

The interaction between host environment and international students plays a critical role in the students' cross-cultural adjustment. However, limited research has captured this interaction in investigating international student acculturation. Building on acculturation and person-environment fit theories, this article investigated student-university alignment of different dimensions as predictors of psychological adjustment of international students at universities in Victoria, Australia. The results of structural equation modeling suggested student-university goal alignment was positively associated with student psychological adjustment. A revealing finding of this article is the mediating role of complementary fit in the relationship between supplementary fit and student psychological adjustment, where the complementary fit was represented by the alignment between student needs and university academic and facilities support, and supplementary fit was represented by student-university goal alignment. The findings have implications for universities and practitioners in developing the necessary resources to support international students.

Australia has shifted its student mobility agenda since 2014 with a commitment to see learning abroad in the Indo-Pacific region, rather than in traditional destinations such as anglophone countries, as a 'rite of passage' for Australian students' future life and career. While there has been rich literature on the impact of outbound student mobility from Australia to anglophone countries, critical inquiry is warranted regarding how Australian students' learning abroad in the Indo-Pacific affects their employability and career directions. This article responds to this paucity in the literature. It is derived from a larger research project, including a survey of 1,362 New Colombo Plan alumni. Unlike dominant conceptualisations of employability focusing largely on the role of disciplinary knowledge and soft skills, this study found affording different perspectives, connections and opportunities and the increased knowledge about the Indo-Pacific have been critical in shaping Australian students' employability and career orientations. The findings of this study provide the empirical base for the development of the concept, 'employability in context', which underscores the importance of moving beyond the conventional discourse about employability and taking into account the contextual factors in conceptualising employability.

Learning abroad is a primary dimension of internationalization of higher education, but little is known about the social impact of learning abroad. While a significant body of the literature in international education has examined learning abroad from the student and academic perspectives, how host communities, especially in the Indo-Pacific, perceive the social impact of hosting students from an Anglophone country like Australia is underresearched. This study addresses this critical gap in the literature by exploring the social impact of Australian students' learning in the Indo-Pacific from the host perspective. This article emerges from an ongoing study on Australian students' learning in the Indo-Pacific via the New Colombo Plan (NCP), the Australian government's signature initiative of student mobility and public diplomacy. It focuses on data from 32 interviews with host organizations, including industry firms, small businesses, nongovernmental organizations, and education institutions, in China, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, and Vietnam. The study shows that not only does the Australian government position the NCP as a strategic public diplomacy tool to build lasting relationships with Indo-Pacific countries, but receiving countries also view the NCP as a catalyst that facilitates the execution of their international agenda. The study identifies four main forms of social impact associated with Australian students' learning abroad in the Indo-Pacific, perceived by the host communities: (1) strengthening bilateral and international ties; (2) fostering student-to-student, university-to-industry, and university-to-university partnerships; (3) strengthening community engagement through service-learning; and (4) enriching host organization's training capacity, human resources, and awareness of their own values.

International graduate employability is critical to host universities' positioning in the education export market, internationalisation agenda and ethical responsibility to international students and alumni. However, little is known about the positioning and re-positioning of international graduates in their home labour market. This article responds to this critical gap in the literature by drawing on in-depth interviews with 30 Vietnamese graduates from Australian universities who have returned to their home country since 2015. The qualitative data were interpreted through the innovative conceptual framework combining Bourdieu's forms of capital and Harré's positioning theory. The study found the emergence of three distinctive positionings of Vietnamese returning graduates: the "explorer," the "advancer" and the "adventurer." Based on the empirical findings, the study contributes to the literature on graduate employability by showing that labour market navigation is an ongoing interaction between initial capitals and continued accumulation of capitals, which play a critical role in determining returnees' positioning and repositioning in the market. The findings of the study provide important implications for returning graduates as well as host universities and home employers to provide effective support for this cohort to enhance their employability and facilitate their access to the home labour market.