Building experience, opportunities, and the resume: motivations of students participating in learning-abroad programmes through the New Colombo Plan

Student mobility from countries in the Anglosphere to the Indo-Pacific has recently become a significant and growing phenomenon. While there has been a large body of literature on international Asian students’ motivations to undertake overseas study, much less has been known about the desires students from English-speaking countries such as Australia have attached to their intra-degree mobility experiences in the Indo-Pacific. This article responds to this critical gap in the literature. It is based on a research project that includes discourse analysis of government policies and 52 semi-structured interviews with staff and Australian students going to China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand, India, Singapore, Cambodia and Vietnam through the New Colombo Plan. The study draws on Bourdieu’s notions of capitals and habitus to analyse students’ motives and aspirations. The findings show that the integrated cultural, symbolic and social capitals students accrue by engaging in the Indo-Pacific through learning abroad programmes hold both strategic and transformative appeal and are centred around building experience, opportunities and the resume. While enhancing employability is one of the key drivers for some participants, many also see short-term study in the Indo-Pacific as being valuable to help them enrich their personal, cultural, experiential and professional selves. However, some are driven by the NCP programme's prestige as a unique and rare opportunity or merely by travelling as lifestyle. Regardless of the value attached to it by the students, the inclusion of learning abroad in a resume marks it as a symbolic capital, thereby giving status and providing a point of differentiation in a crowded labour market. This study provides important implications for institutions to build effective policies and practices for maximising the outcomes of learning abroad programmes.