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

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.