Driven but Adrift: Unraveling the Impact of American Higher Education, Immigration Policy, and the Changing China on Chinese Youth

YINGYI MA, Professor of Sociology and Director of Asian/Asian American Studies at Syracuse University.

Abstract:  This talk is an overview of my new book project, under contract with Columbia University Press, exploring the experiences and transitions of Chinese graduates with American degrees into the global labor market, amid US-China geopolitical headwinds, the COVID-19 pandemic, and domestic downturn within China.

About the Speaker: Yingyi Ma is Professor of Sociology and Director of Asian/Asian American Studies at Syracuse University. She is the non-resident Senior Fellow of Brookings Foreign Policy Program. She is the incoming Chair of Asian/Asian American Section of American Sociological Association. Ma’s research addresses education and migration in the U.S. and China and she has published one monograph and two co-edited volumes and more than 30 journal articles and book chapters. Ma uses mixed methods for her research including large scale surveys and longitudinal interviews.  Her monograph Ambitious and Anxious: How Chinese College Students Succeed and Struggle in American Higher Education, published in 2020 by Columbia University Press, has won Best Book Award, Higher Education Special Interest Group, Comparative and International Education Association, 2021, and Bourdieu Book Award Honorable Mention, American Sociological Association 2021. In 2019, she was selected as a Public Intellectual Fellow at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and she has been a frequent commentator for national and international media outlets. She received her doctoral degree in sociology from Johns Hopkins University in 2007.

Limited space available.
Please RSVP by April 7, 2025