**5. Conclusions**

This article demonstrates that as more and more countries are transitioning to a knowledge-based society and environmentally sustainable economy, attracting and retaining international students as global talent for boosting innovation rank high on the national agenda. International graduates have the linguistic and socio-cultural competences from both host and home countries, and are potentially an important link in building and sustaining a transnational innovation ecosystem. However, the paradox persists when it comes to practice at the local and institutional level. As the case study based on Chinese students' economic and social integration clearly illustrates, Chinese students face a number of challenges in their economic and social integration if they plan to remain in the local Finnish society after graduation. First, from an individual perspective, Finnish as the local language poses a significant challenge to their integration since most students came to study on English-taught programs and thus did not acquire fluent Finnish before graduation, while many employers would prefer to hire workers capable of working in Finnish. Lacking professional networks, which potentially result from lack of social integration with the local people, also led to difficulties in finding jobs among the interviewees. As the one-child generation, they also faced the concerns of a restrictive immigration policy preventing them from bringing their aged parents to take care of if they decided to settle down in the host society. Second, from a societal perspective, Finnish society and also employers are yet to become more open and multicultural to incorporate more foreigners into the Finnish working environment. Most of the interviewees reported not having the same access as native Finns to job opportunities or promotion. Such structural exclusion and marginalization of foreign highly educated workers may detract from such workers' desire to remain in the host society, and jeopardize the national strategy of retaining global talent.

This research identified three implications for students and other stakeholders: First, given the discussion on the language issue above, is it better for students to invest time and effort in acquiring skills highly valued in the labor market or in learning the local language? There seems to be no definite answer to this question, since the labor market demand is contextual and varies from one field to another. However, the interviews in this research suggest that, as highly skilled migrants, the students' job-related skills may be their most important asset with which to compete in the local job market. However, having local language skills besides their mother tongue and being fluent in English will undoubtedly be an advantage in their job seeking processes.

Second, while the students encountered numerous challenges during their integration processes, the current study suggests that the students may need to be more proactive and innovative in their economic integration strategies. This finding is consonant with the research by Cai (2014), which suggests that Chinese students can adopt an entrepreneurial job-seeking approach, that a job-seeker make proposals to potential employers by identifying their needs and utilizing their own special skills and talents to create a position for themselves. Besides possessing the hard skills, the students' soft skills, such as being confident, honest, and cooperative team players, can also play an important role in enhancing their economic integration.

Third, given the various societal barriers faced by Chinese students during their integration, should HEIs and local employers become more multi-cultural to accommodate and retain the global talent? As the present study suggests, integration should be a bi-directional process entailing migrant and host societies' mutual adaptation, both as individuals and as groups. The present findings suggest that Chinese students still face a certain degree of exclusion, not only from potential academic opportunities in the host HEIs, but also from the labor market and society more generally. As Finnish society is becoming increasingly aware of the importance of training and retaining international students as global talent, it can be argued that demanding that only the newcomers 'integrate' is not enough. The host environment (nation-states and organizations) also need to be more open and multiculturally oriented to enhance these highly skilled individuals' capacities to integrate and innovate. By creating an institutional or societal environment that is open to hiring and promoting people from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds to work together, global talent (such as the Chinese students) will be encouraged to utilize their transnational capital and innovative capacity to make a greater contribution.

The findings of this study also suggest that Chinese students' economic and social integration are mutually supportive. Those Chinese students willing to reach out from their comfort zone to meet more local people and obtain more professional opportunities may also have better chances of finding job opportunities in the host society after graduation. It is also clear that those students with work experience in the local society also have opportunities to expand their social networks with the host natives. Overall, international students' economic and social integration is not only a crucial step in their entry into the local society, but also an attractive opportunity for hosting organizations and employers to build multicultural environments that can potentially enhance their productivity and build future sustainable development.

The present research will hopefully be useful for understanding the economic and social integration of Chinese students overseas, especially in the contexts of non-Anglophone countries. Despite its significance, it focuses only on Chinese students in the interviews conducted for this research. To further understand how to better retain international graduates, more studies on Chinese and other groups of international students in similar societal contexts should be conducted to corroborate the present findings. Further research is also needed to include the voices of employers, managerial staff of HEIs, and policymakers in order to assess their understanding and strategies for retaining highly qualified graduates. Finally, since the broad concept of integration for international students has the potential to include academic integration and cultural integration (cross-cultural learning), given the findings presented here, it would be useful to apply quantitative or mixed methods research to ascertain the extent to which these factors are primarily connected with students' integration.

**Funding:** This research received funding from the University of Manchester open-access publication funding.

**Acknowledgments:** The author is grateful for Yuzhuo Cai's comments on an earlier version and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References**


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