Getting Back on Track: Student Migration From India to Germany as a Route to Desirable Employment

Abstract

This article examines the rising postgraduate-level student migration of Indian engineers to Germany, drawing on interviews with 42 Indians who were applying to, currently pursuing, or had recently graduated from engineering Master’s degrees in Germany. It illustrates how the affordable cost of study in Germany had made postgraduate study abroad a feasible strategy for the study participants to escape the unfavourable job market for graduates of engineering undergraduate programmes in India, and attempt to realise their professional ambitions through acquiring post-study work experience at German engineering companies. Such work experience was viewed as having greater social currency in the Indian engineering job market, where most wished to return eventually, than overseas education credentials. Moreover, the article demonstrates how imaginings of Germany as an engineering superpower underpinned the value associated with gaining engineering work experience in the country. This case study shows how in contexts where international students anticipate that the portability of overseas education to a target labour market is uncertain, post-study work experience may be viewed as a safer form of cultural capital to accumulate. Acquiring post-study work experience abroad may then not just be a way to supplement overseas education credentials, as described in existing literature, but the primary motivator of study abroad. It also highlights how, in such contexts, place-based markers of distinction related to a country’s reputation in a particular occupational field can be more relevant in attracting international students than markers of distinction associated with the quality or prestige of its higher education institutions.

Introduction

The number of Indian students in Germany has grown by approximately 138% in the last 5 years, making India the largest source of international students in Germany (DAAD, 2024). The majority of Indians studying in Germany are enrolled on postgraduate engineering programmes (Nair, 2024). In contrast to the ‘traditional’ study destinations for Indian students, such as the US, Germany is a relatively accessible international study destination in the Global North. German public universities – which account for most of the higher education (HE) provision in the country – charge low to no tuition fees, even for international students, and are also offering a growing number of English-taught postgraduate courses, making HE in Germany more accessible to non-German speakers.

Drawing on interviews with 42 Indians who were applying to, currently pursuing, or had recently graduated from engineering Master’s degrees in Germany, this article offers an analysis of how study in Germany has emerged as a strategy to escape the unfavourable engineering job market in India and acquire post-study engineering work experience in Germany. In doing so, the article intervenes in scholarly discussions about the value of overseas education credentials. It shows how in contexts where the transferability of an overseas education to a desired labour market is uncertain, post-study work experience in the study destination may be perceived as a more reliable form of cultural capital to acquire and become the primary motivator of study abroad – rather than a way to enhance overseas education credentials, as described in existing scholarship (e.g. Gribble and Blackmore, 2012; Gribble et al., 2015). It additionally highlights how, in such contexts, a country’s reputation in a specific occupational field can play a more significant role in attracting international students than the reputation of its universities (cf. Prazeres et al., 2017). In what follows, I will outline how the article will contribute to the scholarship on engineering education in India and international student migration (ISM).

The ‘Indian engineering dream’ in crisis

With the liberalisation of the Indian economy in the 1990s and the related growth of the Information Technology (IT) service sector, the rates of return to engineering education in India increased and, consequently, the demand for engineering education rose sharply (Dubey et al., 2019). Engineering degrees came to be widely associated with social prestige and success, particularly among India’s expanding middle classes, and were seen as a potent strategy for achieving upward social mobility (Upadhya, 2016). Government-funded engineering higher education institutions (HEIs) could not meet the demand for engineering education, and there was a largely unregulated proliferation of private engineering HEIs (Tilak, 2023). While prior to the 1990s studying for a degree in engineering was an elite pursuit, the aforementioned factors together with the availability of student loans and the introduction of financial assistance policies have contributed to the massification of engineering education (Tilak, 2023). Today, India produces about 1.5 million engineering graduates each year – more than China and the US put together (Tilak, 2023).

Nevertheless, for over a decade, the ‘Indian engineering dream’ has been fading. Aside from those who attend elite HEIs (Sadik and Brown, 2020), a large proportion of engineering graduates now struggle to find suitable employment (Tilak, 2023). This crisis has been attributed to both the overproduction of engineering graduates and a decline in the quality of engineering education in India, associated with the rapid growth of private providers (Tilak, 2023). Given the poor job prospects facing engineering graduates, since 2012–2013 there has been a slowing down and then a decline in the demand for an engineering education (Tilak, 2023).

Despite the prominence of engineering education in the mobility strategies of the Indian middle classes, there has been very limited research examining engineering students’ experiences of the crisis in engineering employment. Some studies have offered useful quantitative analyses of the predicators of employability (Gokuladas, 2011), determinants of earnings (Tilak, 2023), and gender disparities in employment and earnings (Choudhury, 2015) among engineering graduates in India. However, there is an urgent need for empirical scholarship exploring how engineering students from outside the most elite HEIs – who constitute the majority of engineering students in the country – are navigating transitions to employment. My article will contribute to addressing this gap. It will offer an analysis of how – in the context of a highly congested and competitive job market for engineers in India – affordable English-taught postgraduate courses in Germany have expanded the space across which, and the ways in which, a growing number of Indian engineering students who had previously not viewed study abroad as part of their trajectories are seeking to negotiate university-to-work transitions.

Study abroad as a route to improving career prospects

It is well established in the ISM scholarship that improving career prospects is an important motivator of study abroad (Beech, 2019; Kim, 2011). A dominant argument in existing research on ISM from the ‘East’ to the ‘West’, often drawing implicitly or explicitly on the work of Bourdieu (1986), is that students go abroad to study in order to acquire cultural capital in the form of education credentials that will give them a ‘positional advantage’ in the labour markets of their home countries upon return (Waters and Brooks, 2021). For instance, Waters (2006) illustrates how Hong Kong nationals with education credentials from Canadian universities were confident that private-sector employers in Hong Kong – who had themselves studied abroad, sometimes at the very same universities – would employ them over domestic graduates, seeing them as possessing highly-valued skills and embodied traits associated with the West, and as belonging to the same ‘overseas club’ (p. 188). A number of other studies have also discussed how international students from Asia anticipated that overseas credentials would improve their employment prospects back home (Kim, 2011; Waters, 2009). With increased participation in ISM, the pursuit of education at institutions that are highly reputed has risen (Beech, 2019; Findlay et al., 2012; Kim, 2011). For instance, Beech (2019) discusses how while some of her study participants (international students in the UK) viewed the UK as a whole as being a prestigious HE destination and believed their career prospects would be boosted by education credentials from the country, others had been ‘absolutely meticulous’ in studying the performance of universities and departments in league tables.

However, in recent years, a growing body of research has also drawn attention to the devaluation of overseas education credentials resulting from the global expansion of HE, and to the fact that in highly congested and competitive labour markets an international degree alone may no longer guarantee employment (Gribble et al., 2015). In this context, it has been argued that work experience in the study destination has come to be viewed by international students as a form of capital that can enhance their education credentials – and, therefore, a ‘necessary part of the overseas study ‘package’’ (Gribble et al., 2015: 413). While most research has focused on work experience acquired during the study programme, some studies have shown that the availability of post-study work options is an important factor that students take into account when deciding where to study (Gribble and Blackmore, 2012; Tran et al., 2020), and that many students aim to acquire post-study work experience to complement their overseas education credentials in order to increase their competitiveness on the job markets of their host and home countries as well as on the global market (Gribble and Blackmore, 2012).

In this article, I will contribute to research on the role of overseas work experience in international students’ study-abroad-related strategies. I will argue that the study participants did not anticipate that postgraduate credentials acquired in Germany would have currency in the Indian job market, where most wished to return in due course. However, post-study work experience in their field of specialisation in a German company was seen as a form of cultural capital, which would be portable to India (and elsewhere) and would boost their career prospects. I use ‘cultural capital’ here, drawing broadly on Bourdieu (1986), to refer to competencies and knowledge associated with a specialist field that can be institutionalised through formal job roles and embodied through professional work experience. Acquiring such work experience was not just seen as a strategy to enhance or complement the cultural capital of their education credentials, as described in existing literature, but rather the main goal of study in Germany. I will also argue that Germany was seen as an especially appropriate place to acquire such work experience.

In doing so, this article will contribute to research that has moved beyond a focus on academic prestige and reputability to examine alternative markers of distinction driving the migration of some groups of international students. As Prazeres et al (2017) argue, study destinations may offer distinctive qualities – that do not relate to institutional or academic prestige – which attract prospective international students to them. In their own research, they show how the quality of life offered in specific cities was prioritised and valued by students above the reputability of its universities. They claim that such lifestyle-related factors not only motivated international students to pick a particular destination but were also a marker of distinction in their own right. In this article, I will argue that the majority of the study participants – whose main goal of study in Germany was acquiring work experience in their fields of engineering – foregrounded Germany’s reputation as an engineering superpower in their narratives of what attracted them to the country. Indeed, it was markers of distinction relating to Germany’s reputation in the field of engineering rather than markers of distinction pertaining to the reputability of German HEIs that were most salient for them.

Methods

This article draws on interviews I conducted in 2018 with 42 Indians; the vast majority (33) were current students in German universities, 4 had recently graduated, and 5 were applying to study in Germany. To recruit these participants, I began by sharing (with permission) my ‘Call for Participants’ in social media groups for Indians studying in Germany. I travelled to seven German cities to conduct interviews with those who expressed interest. I recruited further participants through attending events run by the Indian Students Associations at universities in these cities and through snowball sampling. Remote interviews were conducted with three current students based outside the cities I visited and with the five applicants who were in India.

Participants were enrolled on, applying to, or had recently graduated from engineering Master’s programmes in the following fields: chemical (2), civil (5), electrical (9), computer science/IT (11), and mechanical (15). At the time of my data collection, 74% of Indians studying in Germany were male (Jayadeva, 2020a). My interview sample was broadly reflective of this; only seven interviewees were female. My interviewees came from across India and included people from metropolitan cities, smaller cities and towns, and villages. While some were the children of doctors, engineers, and lecturers, others had parents working in agriculture, small-scale industries, and clerical roles in government or private companies. All interviewees described themselves as coming from middle-class families. The Indian middle class is notoriously difficult to define and there is substantial socio-economic diversity among those who identify as belonging to this demographic (Jayadeva, 2018; Sancho, 2017). Scholars make distinctions between the ‘new’ middle classes, whose social and economic position is of more recent origin, and the ‘established’ middle classes (Sancho, 2017). The interviewees included people from both these groups, and they varied in socio-economic background. Most salient for this article, while some had been actively considering studying in destinations such as the US and Canada, the majority emphasised that they had always seen study abroad as beyond their financial capacities until finding out about the affordability of study in Germany. Close to half were the first in their extended families to study abroad.

The interviews explored participants’ reasons for wanting to pursue a Master’s degree in Germany and how they had navigated, or were navigating, the process of going to Germany for study. Informed consent was obtained from all participants. Interviews were recorded with permission and transcribed in full. Interview transcripts were analysed using ATLAS.ti, drawing on inductive and deductive approaches. The project received ethical approval from the German Academic Exchange Service.

An unfavourable job market for engineers

Engineering HEIs in India are highly stratified. In the top tier are the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), followed by National Institutes of Technology (NITs) and Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs), all of which are funded by the union government (Tilak, 2023). Below this tier of elite HEIs is a middle tier of central- and state-government-funded HEIs and some government-aided and private HEIs (Tilak, 2023). Finally, the very large bottom tier is composed of mainly private HEIs (Tilak, 2023). The competition to get admission to one of the HEIs in the top tier is extremely high (Tilak, 2023) – less than 2% of those who write the entrance examination to get admission to an IIT for their undergraduate degree are successful (Niazi, 2022). Students from upper and middle classes are over-represented at these elite HEIs (Varma and Kapur, 2010). None of the study participants had been successful in getting admitted to an IIT for their undergraduate degree.

It has been argued that for some students, study abroad may be a strategy to avoid or escape from actual or anticipated education-related ‘failure’ in the home country – including failure associated with not gaining admission to elite universities or prestigious fields of study because of the high levels of competition for places – and have a second chance at success (Brooks and Waters, 2009; Forsberg, 2017; Waters, 2006). However, the vast majority of participants had not considered pursuing an undergraduate degree abroad upon failing to be admitted to an IIT, typically seeing this as something beyond their financial means (I will return to this point). Instead, they had all enrolled at other, less elite, engineering HEIs in the country; a very small number had attended high-status HEIs (although not of the status of the IITs), while most had attended HEIs they described as being middling, and a handful had attended what they considered to be low-status HEIs. It was only much later, upon finding out about the affordable cost of HE in Germany, that postgraduate study abroad had been formulated as a strategy to escape from actual or anticipated failure on the job market.

For Indian engineering students, the main route for getting one’s first job after completing one’s Bachelor’s degree is ‘campus placements’ – recruitment drives conducted by employers at the campus of one’s HEI. The number and type of employers that an HEI could attract depended on its status (Tilak, 2023). Sadik and Brown (2020) draw attention to how leading corporations in India, including in the field of engineering, are engaged in a ‘war for talent’, competing with each other to recruit students from elite, ‘Tier 1’ institutes like the IITs. These students, or ‘Tier 1 recruits’ as they were called, were given ‘premium pay packages’ and ‘stretch’ opportunities that facilitated professional development. In cases where a corporation recruited from a range of HEIs of different statuses, Tier 1 recruits received better payment and more desirable job roles than the rest (Sadik and Brown, 2020). While those participants from relatively high-status HEIs described many desirable engineering companies conducting recruitment drives at their HEI campuses, the experiences of the broad majority contrasted sharply with those of the ‘Tier 1 recruits’ described by Sadik and Brown (2020).

For example, one participant, Tarun, ¹ who described his HEI as being of middling rank, had volunteered in the HEI’s ‘placement cell’ (a department responsible for organising campus placements). Tarun and his fellow student volunteers had been tasked with telephoning engineering companies and inviting them to conduct a recruitment drive at the HEI. Tarun described how, after telephoning ‘hundreds of companies’, they had managed to get just 15 companies to come to their HEI: ‘People [at the companies that we called] used to hear the name of my college and just hang up’.

Apart from one’s institutional affiliation, one’s field of engineering also mediated the types of job opportunities to which one had access. Given India’s IT boom, the vast majority of job opportunities available to soon-to-be graduates were in software. Aakash, who described his HEI as being of relatively high status, said:

We get about 150 companies every year for the placements. [. . .] Out of these 150 companies, more than 120 are software companies. Imagine, the remaining 30 companies are divided among the seven other engineering streams. So, for chemical engineering, you may only have 2 or 3 companies coming. And there are about, say, 70 chemical engineering graduates.

Furthermore, Aakash and others explained that many IT companies were ‘mass recruiters’ and would often recruit students in the hundreds from a single HEI. In contrast, companies in what were referred to as the ‘core fields’ of engineering – such as mechanical, chemical, civil, and electrical – had a smaller number of jobs to offer. Those participants who were in these latter fields of engineering, and had not studied at high-status HEIs, thus described finding it especially hard to get a job in their fields of specialisation. Goutham, a chemical engineer, told me that only three chemical engineering companies had come to his HEI (which he described as being of middling status) and recruited a total of five students from a cohort of 80 students. Even more extreme, Kannan, an electrical engineer (who described his HEI as being relatively low status) said that not a single electrical engineering company had come to the HEI’s campus placements. It was normal and expected, he said, that his HEI would only be able to attract software companies. In contrast, Srinivas, a mechanical engineer from a relatively high-status HEI, described a wide range of attractive mechanical engineering companies recruiting from his HEI. He himself had been able to get a mechanical engineering job at the Bengaluru office of a German multinational company. Less than a handful of the other participants had been in Srinivas’ position; most had faced situations more similar to Goutham and Kannan.

In interviews, participants told me that many students from core engineering fields, who were not able to find jobs in their fields through campus placements, would end up reluctantly interviewing for and accepting jobs at ‘mass-recruiting’ IT companies. These companies conducted several months of training for all new recruits and were open to hiring graduates from any engineering field. Indeed, prior to going to Germany for study, a number of participants had worked for 1–4 years at an IT company despite having a degree in another field. Unsure about whether more suitable job prospects would be accessible to them – and facing strong parental and societal pressure not to ‘sit at home’ without a job after graduating – accepting an IT job had been seen as a way to at least nominally move forward with their lives. These participants discussed how deeply unhappy they had been while working outside the fields they had specialised in and were passionate about. Moreover, they had worried that the longer they stayed in these jobs, the harder it would be to find their way back to their original fields. As Goutham, a chemical engineer who had worked for 4 years at an IT company, observed: ‘A chemical engineering company would consider IT work experience as zero. Maybe even negative’.

Those with degrees in the core engineering fields who had been able to find employment in their area of qualification had typically been able to secure jobs in small-scale production plants or factories that they perceived as boring and unstimulating, and in many cases paid low salaries that were equivalent to those of people without a university degree. For example, Ravi described the job he had been able to get in a small production plant: ‘[I was] not completely satisfied . . . I [didn’t] want to restrict myself to limited horizons. That was a small industry with routine work’.

In some cases, participants’ dissatisfaction with the jobs they had been able to get related to differences in the type of work that was done ‘offshore’ in India and ‘onsite’ in the Global North (Upadhya and Vasavi, 2012). For instance, Srinivas, who had attended a relatively high-status HEI, had got a job at a German mechanical engineering company in Bengaluru. Although he had initially considered himself very fortunate to have found employment in his field of specialisation at a prestigious multinational company, he had soon become bored with his role:

Basically, back in India, we only have to do what we are asked to do 90 per cent of the times. Like, these people in Germany will take the most important decisions, and we only give them service. We don’t have a lot of freedom. My team, we used to do, I can say the lower half of the work. (Srinivas)

Srinivas’ experience was echoed by many other participants from the fields of computer science and software engineering. Although these students had a better chance of securing jobs at least nominally within their field, they emphasised that most of the computer science and IT jobs available in India were roles in service-based companies rather than product-based companies. Roles at service-based companies were discussed as being less interesting and challenging than roles at product-based companies, with work in the former revolving around testing and management of software created by someone else, while, in the latter, one had the chance to work on product development. As Rafiq explained,

Everything that is pushed off from the main shores gets done in Bangalore. [. . .] So that’s actually the main reason I thought about going for Master’s, [so] I can do actual work instead of doing offshore work.

The small number of product-based companies recruiting in India, participants complained, typically recruited only people from elite HEIs. Lower-status and middling HEIs had mainly – and, in some cases, only – service-based companies recruiting from their student populations.

Participants described how accessing jobs outside of campus placements was extremely challenging. Most private employers did not hire ‘freshers’ – people who had just graduated and had no work experience – except through campus placements. Getting access to engineering jobs in the government and public sector required one to pass extremely competitive exams. Studies have drawn attention to how, in a congested graduate labour market, obtaining a postgraduate qualification has been one strategy employed by the middle classes to secure positional advantage (Brown et al., 2004). However, the majority of participants believed that postgraduate credentials had very little currency in the engineering job market in India – although some felt that a Master’s degree from an IIT could potentially improve their job prospects. In any case, getting admission to a Master’s programme at an IIT required securing a high score and rank in the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering, one of the most competitive tests in India, making this an unfeasible strategy for finding a job for most. Some participants described spending years unsuccessfully preparing for various such tests and exams while unemployed, leaving them feeling hopeless and distraught (‘I was in a total mess’, ‘my confidence was shattered’).

A new strategy for moving forward

A number of studies have documented the anxieties about time experienced by unemployed and underemployed young people, offering powerful descriptions of the feelings of boredom, being in limbo, waiting, and passing time that they reported (Heuzé, 1996; Jeffrey, 2010). Similarly, writing about the migration of academics from the Global North to the Global South, Burford et al. (2021) describe the feeling of career ‘stuckness’ that prompted (and was perpetuated by) such North-to-South academic mobility. They define stuckness as ‘a felt experience, or a situation, where a subject encounters constraint, and sees few opportunities to move out, upward or forward’ (p. 740). As described in the previous section, prior to embarking on study in Germany, my study participants had found themselves in various positions of ‘stuckness’: employed in a job that did not suit their professional training or ambitions; unemployed and preparing for entrance exams with little success; or nearing the end of their Bachelor’s degrees and struggling to find suitable jobs at campus placements. Anxieties about time were prominent in their accounts: they spoke about how they had felt as if they were stagnating, stuck in a limbo, losing and wasting time, and unable to progress.

Upon finding out about the relatively affordable cost of study in Germany, study abroad had, for the majority of participants, emerged for the first time as a possible strategy to move forward. Most described how prior to this they had always viewed study abroad as something beyond their financial means. Such comments were typical:

Initially [during my schooling and undergraduate degree] my mindset was like, ‘only the people with money can do this kind of stuff’. Because countries like Germany were very less known. [. . .] And main destinations for study abroad was US or UK or Australia. And all these countries, they charge a very huge tuition fee. At that time, it was a reality that only people with very rich background, they could go abroad to study. (Hemanth)

A small number of participants described having initially considered other study destinations, particularly the US, which was presented as being the standard – if not the ideal – destination for Indian engineers going abroad to study. While some of these students appeared to have only been vaguely contemplating the possibility of going to the US, Canada, Australia, and so on, others had applied to universities in such countries and received admission letters. However, they noted that studying in any of these countries, given their highly marketised HE systems, would have necessitated taking large loans and even, in some instances, mortgaging the family home. The prospect of incurring substantial debt or having their parents incur such debt close to their retirement weighed heavily on them. As Rosie reflected,

To get that money my parents would have had to mortgage our whole house. That’s too much pressure for me. I wouldn’t even be able to concentrate on learning. Now I’m so chilled. [. . .] The amount I’m spending now is not that much. [. . .] But if I had taken a loan to go to US [. . .] I would have felt that if I don’t do well and get a job, my whole family’s life is at stake.

Thus, for those participants who had considered study in more ‘traditional’ destinations, Germany was seen as offering an alternative path to study abroad: one without significant financial burden and risk, which they believed would have profoundly and adversely shaped their experiences as students and graduates. Although a large proportion of participants had still needed to take loans to cover their living expenses while in Germany, this was viewed as a relatively manageable financial undertaking.

In pursuit of post-study work experience

Study in Germany as a path to acquiring relevant work experience

As discussed previously, in existing ISM research, the majority of which has focused on student migration from the ‘East’ to the ‘West’, it has been argued that international students seek to study abroad because they anticipate that education credentials acquired abroad will set them apart in the eyes of employers back home (Beech, 2019; Waters and Brooks, 2021). Indeed, the value of overseas education credentials is produced and reproduced through such recognition by employers and relevant others (Collins et al., 2017; Waters, 2006). The study participants, however, did not feel confident that their German postgraduate credentials would increase their employability in the eyes of employers in India – where most wished to return eventually – or employers in other countries. Importantly, it was not that they felt that their credentials would not be valued because they had been acquired in Germany, but rather that postgraduate credentials in general did not have much currency on the engineering job market in India, and perhaps beyond. When I asked about what would happen should they return to India soon after the completion of their degree, responses like these were typical:

I won’t have any chance. [. . .] As far as I know, the companies don’t care what degree you have. Work experience is what matters. (Hitesh)

[A degree from Germany] doesn’t help much. If you have work experience, you can actually negotiate with the employers. Because without work experience, they will just treat you as a fresher. (Sobia)

Like Hitesh and Sobia, most participants believed that what would be recognised and valued by employers in India and elsewhere was post-study work experience in their field of engineering at a Germany company. This was a form of cultural capital that they anticipated would be more portable than education credentials, and acquiring such capital was seen as essential for boosting their career prospects in India and beyond.

Most explained that had they been able to directly get an engineering job in Germany with their Indian Bachelor’s degree, they would have never considered doing a Master’s degree in the country. However, it was widely felt that an Indian Bachelor’s degree – unless it was acquired at one of India’s most prestigious HEIs – would not be valued on the German job market. Nevertheless, such a degree could still get one admission at a German university. German education credentials in turn, they anticipated, would enable them to access the German job market.

Studying for a Master’s degree in Germany was also viewed by participants as a pathway to the German job market for other reasons. Internships and placements at companies, which were built into most Master’s programmes, were discussed as providing opportunities for the acquisition of embodied cultural capital and social capital, which they believed would increase their employability (cf. Collins et al., 2017; Gribble et al., 2015). For instance, participants spoke about how placements offered a chance to gain familiarity with German work culture as well as pick up corporate ‘soft skills’. Several cited examples of ‘seniors’ – Indian students some years ahead of them at their German HEI – in their social networks, who had got jobs at the same companies at which they had interned, or who had been referred by colleagues at these companies to other desirable employment opportunities. In addition, although German language skills were not required to study in Germany, it was widely felt that having at least an intermediate level of German language proficiency was important for improving one’s job prospects in the country. Living in Germany while studying for a Master’s degree was seen as providing many opportunities for acquiring German proficiency, from affordable German language lessons at universities to chances to communicate in German. Finally, completing a Master’s degree in Germany permitted one to remain in the country for up to 18 months to find a job.

An attractive destination for acquiring engineering work experience

It is well recognised that perceptions of place held by prospective international students play an important role in mediating their educational mobility (Beech, 2019). Scholars of ISM have drawn on and developed Said’s (2003) concept of ‘imaginative geographies’ to discuss how prospective international students bring together information acquired through various channels – from their social networks to the media to university advertising – to construct understandings and imaginings of what study abroad at a particular country, city, and university might look like (Beech, 2014; Kölbel, 2020). Such imaginative geographies can inform prospective international students’ understandings of the reputation of a study destination as well as motivate and have substantial influence on their study-abroad-related decisions (Beech, 2014, 2019).

The participants emphasised that they had seen Germany as an attractive destination, even prior to arriving in the country. Their accounts revealed several prominent understandings and perceptions of Germany’s appeal. Central to students’ imaginative geographies of Germany was the perception of the country as an ‘engineering superpower’, as one student put it. While many reflected that they had not known much about Germany’s HE system and Germany as an international study destination until relatively recently, they had long been aware, they said, that Germany was synonymous with excellence in engineering. Those participants who were mechanical engineers, especially, all noted that there was nowhere to beat Germany when it came to mechanical engineering. For instance, Vishal and Gaurav observed,

I knew the automotive industry in Germany is one of the best in the world. And German engineering is, of course, world class. (Vishal)

I knew that Germany was the topmost country for mechanical engineering, but I didn’t know they offer Master’s. I mean I didn’t know it’s so open to international students. Because you don’t hear about this. (Gaurav)

Several described how even as undergraduates in India, they had been well aware that some of the leading companies in their field of engineering were German companies. These would have been ‘dream companies’ at which to work, and while some did have branches in India, as discussed earlier, they recruited mainly from the most elite engineering HEIs, and – at the very least – the most interesting and coveted job roles at such companies went only to those from such elite HEIs.

Also prominent in students’ imaginative geographies of Germany was the perception of the country as highly developed, offering a ‘first-world’ quality of life and, more importantly, a robust job market with numerous desirable opportunities for engineers. The fact that Germany had a shortage of engineers (Pladson, 2023) was also brought up by many participants and strengthened their view about the availability of desirable job opportunities in the country. During the first wave of the pandemic, the participants as well as prospective international students from India I met in ‘Study in Germany’ mutual-support Facebook and WhatsApp groups, were significantly more concerned about how the pandemic would impact the job market in Germany than about how it would impact their educational experience, but most remained optimistic that even if there was a recession, the German economy would be relatively well equipped to bounce back (Jayadeva, 2020b).

In addition, a German Master’s degree was viewed as a relatively safe path to the German job market because of the way the German HE system was imagined. In stark contrast to the HE systems in the US and India, the German system was understood as being relatively non-hierarchical and populated by HEIs of uniformly high quality, with employers not valuing degrees from some HEIs significantly above others. Several participants reflected that when they had first begun researching Germany as a possible study destination, they had been very focused on trying to find information about the relative ranking of HEIs within the country, concerned that they would not be able to get a job in their field in Germany if they studied at an HEI that was not of sufficiently high status. However, they had then heard – through their social networks and through ‘Study in Germany’ student communities on social media – that graduates of all German HEIs enjoyed similar job prospects. ² For example, Srinivas observed,

Very much unlike in India, what I’ve heard is that most of the universities in Germany have almost similar standards [. . .]. Lectures are almost similar. Companies normally don’t differentiate between people who study at X Uni and people who study at Y Uni. As long as you have what they want [. . .] they don’t mind hiring you regardless of which college you are from.

The majority of participants planned to work in Germany for several years – estimates varied from 2 to 10 years – and then return to India or, in a few cases, go to another country (although some noted that it was possible their plans might change, depending on how they found living and working in Germany). All stressed that with several years of work experience under their belt, they would have good job prospects and therefore the freedom and flexibility to go where they wished.

Discussion and conclusion

An emerging body of research has highlighted how overseas education credentials alone may no longer boost international students’ career prospects, and has drawn attention to how such credentials may need to be supplemented or enhanced with work experience acquired in the study destination, typically during the programme of study (Gribble and Blackmore, 2012; Gribble et al., 2015; Tran et al., 2020). My article takes forward this research on the importance of work experience for international students, through showing how for certain groups of student migrants, acquiring post-study work experience abroad may be viewed as the primary motivator of study abroad, rather than just a valuable add-on. In contrast with studies that have described post-study work in the study destination as a path to earn money to pay back loans, obtain permanent residence, or develop an international career (Robertson and Runganaikaloo, 2014; Tran et al., 2020), the majority of participants in this study viewed themselves returning to India in due course and saw overseas post-study work experience as a form of cultural capital far more likely than overseas postgraduate credentials to have social currency in the Indian engineering labour market. The article thus illustrates how in contexts where the portability of overseas education is anticipated to be uncertain, post-study work experience in the study destination may be perceived as a safer and more important form of cultural capital to accumulate. Moreover, the article shows how, in such contexts, place-based markers of distinction related to a country’s reputation in a specific occupational field can be more relevant in attracting international students than markers of distinction associated with the quality or prestige of its HEIs.

A large proportion of internationally mobile students come from socio-economically privileged backgrounds (Waters and Brooks, 2021). However, a range of factors on both the demand and supply side have contributed to widening participation in ISM over the last decades – from the growth of the middle classes and massification of HE in a number of countries (Luthra and Platt, 2016); to developments in the migration infrastructure mediating mobility (Jayadeva, 2020a, 2024); to the impact of specific education policies (Kim, 2018) and migration policies (Robertson and Runganaikaloo, 2014); to charitable interventions (Gaulter and Mountford-Zimdars, 2018). This article adds to this research through highlighting for the first time how less-marketised study destinations like Germany are inadvertently becoming pathways of widening participation in ISM, opening up the possibility of study abroad to groups who would not have otherwise been able to engage in such educational mobility because of financial constraints. More specifically, the article has explored how the tuition fee policies of German universities and increased provision of English-taught postgraduate courses have expanded the space across which and the ways in which a demographic of Indians, who had thus far not viewed study abroad as part of their trajectories, are seeking to navigate university-to-work transitions.

In so doing, this article has joined a small body of scholarship that has shown how international student migration can be a strategy drawn on by relatively less elite groups to acquire capital they perceive themselves as lacking (Sancho, 2017; Waters and Brooks, 2021). The article has described how in the field of engineering employment in India, the only type of cultural capital perceived as being convertible into desirable jobs was undergraduate education credentials from high-status HEIs and relevant work experience. Lacking the ‘right’ education credentials and unable to access appropriate work experience, participants found themselves in a position of ‘stuckness’ (Burford et al., 2021). With routes to class reproduction, social mobility, and/or the achievement of professional ambitions closed off at home, a postgraduate degree in Germany offered participants a second chance at success through providing a path to acquiring high-quality engineering work experience, which they anticipated would enable them to become competitive in the Indian engineering job market and beyond.

Colonial legacies and the related emergence of English as a ‘global’ language mean that Anglophone countries have especially benefitted from rising ISM, and many non-Anglophone countries are offering English-taught programmes in order to claim a share of the international market for HE, as well as to meet broader goals related to internationalisation (Macaro et al., 2018; Waters and Brooks, 2021). This article, however, raises questions about the limits of the ‘English-medium’ experience a non-Anglophone study destination can offer its students in a context where post-study work experience is an important goal of study abroad. Without English-taught postgraduate programmes, it is unlikely that Germany would have emerged as a popular study destination among Indian students. However, most participants perceived German language skills as being necessary for success on the German job market, and therefore something that had to be acquired for study in Germany to make sense. The time and effort it would take to acquire even intermediate-level German language skills was seen as an investment worth making only because of the low cost of study in Germany. The growing importance of acquiring post-study work experience for international students thus serves to strengthen the competitive advantage of universities in Anglophone countries over fee-charging universities in non-Anglophone countries offering English-medium study programmes.