Ballatore, Magali: Erasmus et la mobilité des jeunes européens: entre mythes et réalités, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010, 204 pp., €18, ISBN 978-2-13-058126-0
The Erasmus programme is described by the European Union as a success story. Since it was launched in 1987, more than 2.2 million students have participated in the exchange programme and studied in a foreign European country for more than three months. For the period 2007–2013, the EU is investing 3.1 million Euros in the programme, making it the major pillar of the general Lifelong Learning Programme. The main objectives of the programme for supporting student mobility are ‘to enable students to benefit educationally, linguistically and culturally from the experience of learning in other European countries’, and to ‘contribute to the development of a pool of well-qualified, open-minded and internationally experienced young people as future professionals’.
Sociologist Magali Ballatore has made the Erasmus programme the object of her thesis, recently published as Erasmus et la mobilité des jeunes Européens (Erasmus and the Mobility of Young Europeans). Her aim is to critically examine different aspects of the Erasmus programme – to what extent does the programme match its rhetoric of being ‘enriching’ and ‘popular’? – by setting the programme in a larger context of changes in higher education and migration and in relation to fundamental social, political and economic transformations in European societies.
The inquiry is designed as an international comparison on the basis of case studies. Italy, France and Great Britain are chosen in order to represent one Mediterranean country, one Central European country, and one North European country. In each country, one university is investigated (University of Turin, University of Provence, and University of Bristol are the institutions included) by a survey and a series of interviews, conducted at different points in time. The survey has been distributed to and answered by both Erasmus students and sedentary students.
In the initial description of the Erasmus programme, the three national systems of higher education and their relation to the labour market, it becomes clear that there are large and important differences between the countries. For example, Great Britain receives far more Erasmus students than it sends out, while the opposite is true for Italy. In Great Britain, the so-called rate of return for investments in education is higher than in the other two countries, and the level of unemployment for highly educated young people is substantial in Italy.
The survey shows that there exist differences between the seats of learning. The Erasmus students in Bristol usually spend their fourth academic year abroad, while the timing at the other two universities is more diverse. The session abroad tend to more often function as a sabbatical year for the Bristol students, whereas – especially for the Italian students – it is an important possibility for increasing the professional opportunities. There are also important differences between the Erasmus students and their companions that have participated in the exchange programme. The Erasmus students originate in larger proportions from upper-middle-class families; have on average succeeded better in upper secondary school and at university level; and have more frequently been abroad.
One distinct problem with the study regards the research design. A comparative approach is generally valuable and scientifically productive, but the limited number of cases – one university in three countries each – gives us insufficient material from which to draw conclusions. The picture is further complicated by the fact that one of the institutions, the University of Bristol, sets itself apart from the other two by recruiting larger portions of students from well-to-do-backgrounds and being more meritocratically selective. It is thus difficult to say if differences between the countries are effects of variances in recruitment patterns or in national conditions. However, perhaps the most interesting result – that the Erasmus students differ from the sedentary students in a number of important aspects – is valid for all three universities, despite the different national contexts.
A second line of critique regards the choice to focus solely on the Erasmus students. Most international students are free-movers, and it would have been interesting to compare the Erasmus students with this population. Some of the problems for the Erasmus students, such as weak integration in the foreign society and little time devoted to studies, highlighted in the study are perhaps not valid for the free-movers. Furthermore, the internationalisation of higher education has become more complex, with an emphasis on ‘internationalisation at home’, on the one hand, and joint degrees and off-shore education on the other hand. It would have been valuable to position the Erasmus student empirically in a larger context of the internationalisation of higher education.
The overall impression of Ballatore's work is that it significantly contributes to our understanding of the internationalisation of higher education. By its detailed account of the students’ experiences of the Erasmus programme at three universities in three national settings, we better comprehend how the value and perception of the Erasmus experience changes with national and social conditions, and how it functions for some as a way to move up by moving out, and for others as a means for compensating for a lack of educational success.
Mikael Börjesson, Uppsala University, Sweden