Fees, flows and imaginaries: exploring the destination choices arising from intra-national student mobility

ABSTRACT

Are intra-national student flows driven by the same forces as international student mobility? This paper addresses this question by analysing cross-border student mobility in the UK. The paper identifies four principles that one might expect to drive the destination choices of students from Scotland enrolling in English universities. Following a statistical analysis of student destination choices, it is argued that cross-border moves from Scotland to England are stimulated by some of the same global forces as international student mobility (such as a desire to accumulate cultural capital), but in terms of destination choice the imaginaries held by Scottish students of ‘good’ places to study in England to accumulate cultural capital are constructed differently from the imaginaries of international students.

KEYWORDS:

• Tuition fees
• student mobility
• cultural capital
• destination choices
• glocalisation

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to Heike Jöns for drawing my attention to this interesting contrast. We are indebted to Ian Shuttleworth for this point.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This research was undertaken within a wider research programme financed by ESRC grant ES/G027153/1.