U.S. Engineering Degrees for Improving South Indian Graduate Students’ Marriage and Dowry Options

Abstract

The article examines improved marriage opportunities as an unexplored motivator for pursuing international education via U.S. graduate engineering degrees and stresses the need to centralize gender in analyzing academic mobility and international education. This interdisciplinary qualitative study explores how South Indian men and women’s experiences with international graduate education migration held gendered consequences for marriage and dowry. The participants show that the pursuit of a U.S. graduate engineering degree impacts a family’s social and financial status by improving student’s marriage options, including love marriages, arranged ones, and dowry. The research has implications for the recruitment and retention of Indian men and women engineers as graduate school migration overlaps with the socially preferred marriage timeline and it encourages policy makers and administrators to consider nontraditional motivators.