Global pathways: new evidence on the international graduate school choice of Chinese outbound students

China serves as an indispensable recruitment market for higher education institutions across the globe. Using large-scale administrative and survey data from one of China’s pipeline provinces for sending students abroad, we provide new evidence on the factors influencing Chinese students’ graduate school choices internationally. We model international student mobility as a function of schooling-constrained, international migration, and consumption values. Descriptive results from nested logit model and multinomial logit model support the model predictions. We also construct counterfactual policy simulations by examining what would have happened under different potential scenarios in both China and destination countries. The simulation results show that the changes in Chinese college quality and family income are likely to affect the number of Chinese students studying abroad but not their distribution patterns among destination countries. In the meanwhile, factors including scholarship opportunities, work visa policies, and recruitment efforts in the destination countries would substantially shift Chinese students’ choice of destination country and therefore the specific graduate school location. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10734-022-00979-6.