Skill-Sorting, Self-Selectivity, and Immigration Policy Regime Change: Two Surveys of Chinese Graduate Students' Intention to Study Abroad

摘要

The United States has experienced a drop in international student enrollment, between 6 and 10 percent, for three consecutive years since 2001. The overall decline in enrollment from China was 8 percent, while enrollment from India declined 4 percent (Council of Graduate Schools, 2004). This paper focuses on the changing immigration policy regime and the different dimensions in self-selectivity of graduate students' study-abroad decisions before and after 2001, and a U.S. visa regime change. In particular, I use two surveys in 1999 and 2004 to analyze the changing dimensions on student's ability before and after the U.S. visa policy change in 2001. By operationalizing a student's "ability" into three skill indexes, in-class ranking (rank), research project participation (project), research paper publications (publications), I show that students are likely to be negatively self-selected (lower-ability students wanted to study abroad more than others) in terms of ranking and projects in 1999. More importantly, the pattern of student ability selectivity changed after the immigration policy regime shifted; there is an increase in projects but a significant decrease in publications (at the one and two papers level). This suggests that skill-sorting may be due to a marginal return of specific endowment (ability) and the influence of place-specific human-capital development. This paper extends the literature by showing different dimensions of skill-sorting in selectivity when there is a (negative) policy shock.