Transnational education, labor market outcomes and graduate employability: a scoping review

What is it about?

Graduate labor market outcomes, and more broadly, employability, are cloudy, culturally-bound concepts with little consensus across countries. It is now well established from a variety of studies that employability and labor market outcomes do not transfer seamlessly across cultural contexts, and that this can be a particular area of concern for graduates of transnational education programs, who have a foreign education bounded within a localized international institution. In this scoping review, 51 sources are reviewed that deal directly with the employability and labor market outcomes of transnational education graduates, revealing that researchers primarily use qualitative methods and socio-economic theories to center the student voice and focus on international branch campuses in the Middle East and Asia. Notably, there is a lack of focus on staff experiences regarding the process of preparing students for employment. Several key areas emerge as possible avenues for further research, and implications for career ecosystems theory are discussed.

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