Examining student immobility: a study of Irish undergraduate students

ABSTRACT

This paper explores student mobility among Irish higher education students. It specifically focuses on the profile of ‘stayers’, that is, students who have no plans to study abroad, thus addressing an underexplored topic in existing literature on student mobility. The article aims to identify factors that impact on students’ decisions not to pursue study abroad. Drawing on a national survey of students, Eurostudent V, the findings demonstrate that immobility is predicted by mother’s level of education and family income, showing the salience of socio-economic factors. Age and language proficiency are also visible factors, with the main obstacles to mobility being finances, language barriers and not wanting to separate from family and friends. Trends are also visible in the education institution a student is enrolled in, with those in institutes of technology more likely to be immobile than those in universities.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education institutions
• immobility
• Irish students
• socio-economic status
• study abroad

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank those at the Higher Education Authority, Dublin, Ireland, who granted access to the Eurostudent V data set, upon which this analysis is based.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The study uses odds ratios (ORs). An OR is a measure of association between an exposure and an outcome. The OR represents the odds that an outcome will occur, given the presence of a particular factor compared to the odds of the outcome occurring in the absence of that factor. For example, in this paper it represents the odds that students are immobile, given the presence of the listed factors. With ORs, association does not infer causation (Altman, 1991).

2 The p values indicate the level of statistical significance, with significance set at p < .05 or lower. Thus, highly significant relationships are visible where p < .001. A significance level of p < .001 means that the likelihood is less than one in a thousand that this relationship would occur by chance.

3 The increased Pseudo R² statistic in Model 2 (Table 1) illustrates that the expanded model (adding background variables) is more robust at predicting immobility among native Irish full-time undergraduate students.