Abstract
Chapter 4 focuses on student mobility, using the example of the Erasmus undergraduate exchange platform to explain how this form of movement has come to be dominated by young people from well-off backgrounds, who tend to possess high levels of social and economic capital as well as being pre-attuned to the values associated with the European institutions. For this reason, Erasmus inevitably fails to spread employability or advance inter-cultural understanding and Europeanisation objectives since movers are already in possession of these attributes. For education professionals working for Erasmus in national contexts subject to austerity, long-standing challenges in mobility governance relating to bureaucratic and resource issues, and inequalities in the regional distribution of resources for the programme, are heightened by economic pressures on economic crisis-hit families. This situation greatly reduces the number of student candidates for outward mobility, explaining the growing disparities in levels of circulation between different European countries.
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Notes
- 1.
The research discussed in the chapter is taken from work conducted during the project ‘International Student Mobility: A Socio-Demographic Perspective’, coordinated by David Cairns at the Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology, ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon, and funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (SFRH/BPD/103320/2014).
- 2.
A smaller number of data-driven works have sought to address more specific issues, such as the identification of barriers and drivers to circulation (González et al., 2011; Souto-Otero et al., 2013; Beerkens et al., 2016), the impact of Erasmus on employment prospects and employability (Teichler and Janson, 2007; European Commission, 2014c) and gender imbalances in participation (Böttcher et al., 2016). It should also be noted that much cited databases on student mobility collated by UNESCO and OECD do not include short-duration credit mobility. Kelo et al. (2006b, p. 196) also note that datasets compiled by organisations such as UNESCO, OECD and EUROSTAT contain hard to estimate margins of errors due to their dependence on unreliable national data sources.
- 3.
To state that students are required to be reflexive in planning their lives is not particularly insightful. We are all required to be reflexive in our daily lives to the point that in the recent past an entire epoch was characterised as the age of ‘reflexive modernisation’, commonly linked to processes of individualisation (see, e.g., Giddens, 1991; Beck et al., 1994; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2006).
- 4.
While the idea is simple, making reflexive mobility happen requires skill, coordination and dedication. In addition to advertising opportunities, and borrowing a term associated with Bourdieu (1990), mobility professionals are required to construct a mobility favouring habitus within their university institutions. This habitus illustrates how reflexive ways of organising one’s life are advantageous to one’s career while tacitly contributing to the building of a European gestalt, which is an equivalent to the smaller-scale family environment that generates mobility dispositions in certain circumstances (Cairns et al., 2013).
- 5.
Credit mobility is a term used by the EC to denote the fact that student movers receive course accreditation for work undertaken while abroad on return to their sending institution (European Commission, 2015a, p. 8).
- 6.
Each institution that participates in Erasmus has its own international office managing incoming and outgoing mobility. If we take into account the fact that Erasmus traverses all 28 Member States plus affiliated countries (the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Turkey), in addition to staff employed by the EC in other partner countries, this amounts to a population of several thousand individuals, albeit with a much greater density in countries with a stronger Erasmus history, for example, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
- 7.
The number of interviews conducted in each institution varied considerably, considering Erasmus participation ranged from 2000 incoming students and 1000 outgoing to several hundred arrivals and only a handful of outgoers. In each case study, this included a senior member of staff to ensure that the views of each institution were appropriately represented. The bulk of this work was conducted between January and May 2016, with some additional follow-up during the production of this chapter. Due to the need to protect the anonymity of interviewees, neither they nor their institutions are identified in the subsequent discussion, and other details, such as place names or references to individuals, are also omitted from interview extracts. This research also involved ethnography, including observation of meetings and exchange student life, which is an approach influenced by the work of Garsten and Nyqvist (2013) on complex organisations.
- 8.
A similar state of affairs exists with regard to youth employment policy, centring upon the misuse of the NEET (not in education, employment or training) signifier (see, e.g., Furlong, 2006), resulting in an over-concentration upon those with obvious education and skills deficits.
- 9.
Given the strong associations between employment and mobility in neo-classical migration theory, it is often assumed that extreme austerity is a driver of migration. However, as a more considered analysis in Portugal has revealed, the reality is more one of a return to previous twentieth-century norms of migration, with young people making recourse to outward movement and circulation due to exclusion from the local labour market, albeit with a greater concentration of skilled migrants alongside the more traditional low-skilled movers (Justino, 2016, pp. 1–2, 14). Therefore, while there has been outward migration among the highly qualified after the onset of the crisis, this is a continuation of an existing trend not the start of a new one, and there is not necessarily a causal relationship between these two simultaneous phenomena.
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Cairns, D., Cuzzocrea, V., Briggs, D., Veloso, L. (2017). Working for Europe? Managing Erasmus+ in the Austerity Era. In: The Consequences of Mobility. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46741-2_4
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