ACA Papers on International Cooperation in Education

Linking rhetoric, practice and mobility trends

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The promotion of international student and staff mobility has over the past decades become a major policy
objective of the European Union. Large-scale mobility programmes, such as ERASMUS, have been created,
and ambitious mobility targets (20% of all students) have been set at the European level, to ensure that more and more European students become internationally mobile.

Have these European efforts been mirrored by similar attempts at the national level? Are national policies and strategies in line with the European mobility ambitions, and if so, on which issues and to what extent? More generally, is there cross-country convergence in the mobility policies, priorities and instruments of individual European countries? These are some of the questions the present study explores. It was produced by the Academic Cooperation Association in cooperation with NUFFIC and DAAD, and with financial support from the European Commission. The study finds that very few European countries have a fully-fledged mobility policy in place.

Most European countries have a rather piecemeal mobility approach. The book explores similarities and differences between national approaches with regard to type of mobility, quantitative mobility targets, priority regions/countries, and policy making actors, amongst others. Next to a Europe-wide overview, the study contains in-depth explorations of eight European countries.