‘It doesn’t really matter which university you attend or which subject you study while abroad.’ the massification of student mobility programmes and its implications for equality in higher education

ABSTRACT

Based on documentary analysis and interviews, the article examines the current practices of Irish universities in their efforts to increase their students’ participation in international exchange programmes. It argues that increased participation, while a positive outcome, obscures a growing differentiation in the types of exchange programmes and destinations. This emerging stratification leads to differentiated experiences and outcomes, which may amplify other forms of stratification pervading the higher education sector. In particular, we look at the emergence of different models of exchange, that have moved away from an academic focus towards a more easily manageable model better suited to the massification underway. We suggest that Irish higher education institutions contribute to making credit mobility a space, where students can deploy socially unequal strategies and where the more vulnerable remain either excluded, or limited to ‘second best’ programmes, devalued academically or where pedagogic opportunities are lost. This is one of the manifestations of the production of internationalization under the pressures of cost-saving, corporatization and the employability discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• Internationalization
• student mobility
• employability
• Ireland
• inequality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Aline Courtois is a Research Associate in the Centre for Global Higher Education, University College London Institute of Education. She was previously a Research Fellow at the National University of Ireland, Dublin.

ORCID

Aline Courtois http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0777-5100

Notes

1. Magali Ballatore’s work examines these processes in her comparative study of France, Italy and the UK (e.g. Ballatore 2013).

2. All participants have been de-identified.

3. Based on figures retrieved from http://ec.europa.eu/education/library/statistics/ay-12-13/facts-figures_en.pdf.

4. Irish students also have access to non-EU exchange but no consistent figures are available.

5. In 2013–14 (most recent available figures), UL sent 504 students on Erasmus; while the second sender, UCD, sent 391. Figures retrieved from http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/education_culture/repository/education/library/statistics/2014/erasmus-sending-institutions_en.pdf.

6. One international officer remarked that outgoing Erasmus students were treated as ‘second-class citizens’ in the university, because scarce resources are focussed on the more prestigious and/or lucrative forms of exchange and incoming mobility.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National University of Ireland: NUI Dr Garret FitzGerald Post-doctoral Fellowship in the Social Sciences 2014–2016.