ABSTRACT
The recruitment and promotion of talent is central to the performance of universities. In this chapter, we study the impact of overseas experience on full-time university faculty academic promotion in Chinese research universities. We examine whether returnees are more likely than domestic faculty to be promoted at the different stages of their academic career. Using the survival analysis method, we investigate differences in time to academic promotion between academic returnees and domestic faculty. The Kaplan-Meier analysis results show that faculty with overseas experience have a lower survival risk when entering the associate professor stage, meaning they have a longer academic career and delayed promotion to the associate professor stage and a shorter period of time and accelerated promotion to the full professor stage. Furthermore, the Cox proportional hazard regression analyses show that there is no significant difference between overseas returnees and local faculty entering the associate professor stage, while the promotion difference between overseas returnees and local faculty entering the full professor stage mainly manifests in those working in natural science and engineering disciplines.
