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A central theme in the literature on transnational migration is the embeddedness of such movement in social networks and the utilisation of social capital in facilitating mobility. This case study on overseas Chinese students and mainly non-Chinese foreign students studying at a top university in Taipei brings in the notions of cultural capital and city. It investigates the ways social networks shape the destination choices of these two groups of students, and how their patterns of adjustment in the host milieu and attachment to the host city are affected by the transnational migration network (and the lack of it), embodied cultural capital and different host imaginaries constructed by the Taiwan government. The results show that these two groups of international students differed in their reliance on transnational migration networks in making destination choices prior to migration. Furthermore, the different forms of social networks and the differential social and cultural capital embedded in their respective groups, along with the distinctive host images that were constructed by the Taiwan government to cater for these two groups, shaped their overseas experiences and attachment to the city of Taipei in distinctive ways.

Over the last few decades, international student mobility has come to be increasingly viewed in both scholarly and policy discourse as a valorised pathway to personal development, career success, and class reproduction. This framing of international study has been particularly prominent in accounts of mobility to Anglophone universities that have dominated the literature to date. Yet, despite these claims, most research has been undertaken with current students, and hence, the significance of international study has remained speculative and caught up with dominant discourses that tend to valorise this form of mobility. In this paper, we subject these claims to critical examination by analysing the narratives of alumni who have studied overseas in three leading universities in East Asia. We focus, in particular, on the ways in which international student mobility articulates through after-study lives in terms of the forms of situated learning and cultural capital expressed by alumni, the geographical configurations and circulations that shape the portability of education, and altered sensibility and onward mobilities that are generated through international study. Through this discussion, we demonstrate that international study often does have value in after-study lives, but that this value is highly situated in the networks and spaces that alumni move through and enact. Our paper then demonstrates that there is nothing automatic about the portability of overseas education, and that there is a need for scholars to examine not only student mobility itself but the way this unfolds into after-study lives.