This is a nationally representative cross-sectional survey of Chinese international students in the UK, with a comparison group of UK home students. It is part of a wider study with other surveys in Germany and China. The study population are taught (undergraduate and postgraduate) Chinese students studying in UK universities. Areas covered in the questionnaires: Socio-demographic characteristics and course details; family background (parental education, occupation, household income, siblings); prior education (academic achievement and educational migration); motivations for study abroad and decision-making process; personality traits and values (e.g., risk-taking attitude); study experience in current course; health and wellbeing; future life course aspirations; cosmopolitan vs national orientations.Young people moving away from home to seek 'bright futures' through higher education are a major force in the urbanization of China and the internationalization of global higher education. Chinese students constitute the largest single group of international students in the richer OECD countries of the world, making up 20 percent of the total student migration to these countries. Yet systematic research on a representative sample of these student migrants is lacking, and theoretical frameworks for migration more generally may not always apply to students moving for higher education. Bright Futures is a pioneering study that investigates key dimensions of this educational mobility through large-scale, representative survey research in China, the UK and Germany. We explore this phenomenon in two related aspects: the migration of students from the People's Republic of China to the UK (this data collection) and Germany for higher education, and internal migration for studies within China. This research design enables an unusual set of comparisons, between those who stay and those who migrate, both within China and beyond its borders. We also compare Chinese students in the UK and Germany with domestic students in the two countries. Through such comparisons we are able to address a number of theoretical questions such as selectivity in educational migrations, aspirations beyond returns, the impact of transnationalization of higher education on individual orientations and life-course expectations, and the link between migration and the wellbeing of the highly educated. Bright Futures is a collaborative project, involving researchers from University of Essex, University of Edinburgh, UNED, University of Bielefeld and Tsinghua University. The research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), German Research Foundation (Germany) and the National Natural Science Foundation (China).

The sample design is a two-stage stratified sample, with universities as the Primary Sampling Units (PSUs). The sample was stratified by university ranking and the size of Chinese students enrolled at the institution to ensure that students from different types of universities were proportionately represented. Within each university that agreed to participate we either sampled all Chinese students in undergraduate and taught postgraduate programmes, or (in universities with a very large population of Chinese students) took a random sample. In each university, we sampled the same number of British home students as Chinese students for comparison. The questionnaire for UK home students is designed to serve as a comparison group to Chinese students. All questionnaires were in the students’ main language, i.e. Chinese or English respectively. The survey was conducted online. The response rate at the student level was approximately 13 percent. Survey fieldwork took place between April 2017 and March 2018. The achieved sample size in the UK is 1,446 Chinese students and 1,678 home students.