Academic mobility

Academic mobility refers to students and teachers in higher education moving to another institution inside or outside their own country to study or teach for a limited time.

In some cases, it is chosen for positive reasons, usually by young students with no family commitments; however, for most researchers, it is a form of casualization, which can blight their whole careers and break up their families. Academic mobility suffers from cultural, family, socio-economical, and academic barriers. The Bologna process attempts to lower these obstacles within the European higher education area.

Mobile students are usually divided into two groups: Free-movers are students who travel entirely on their own initiative, while programme students use exchange programmes at a department, faculty, institution, or national level (such as Erasmus, Nordplus or Fulbright). Nowadays, the traditional Erasmus exchange (which involves travelling) has been complemented with virtual mobility, or Virtual Erasmus, in which students from different countries may study together without leaving their home.

According to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the mobility of international students has significantly increased in the past four decades, from 250,000 in 1965 to approximately 3.7 million in 2011. These statistics show the academic mobility of international students that aim for a degree rather than short-term "study abroad" education.UNESCO suggests that there are over 2.7 million students studying in a country other than their origin country. The group of Asian students is the largest constituent part of all students who enrolled in the overseas schools. They make up 45 percent of total of international students in OECD countries and 52 percent of total in non-OECD countries.

Most mobile students suffer from lots of barriers both in their lives and academic activities. For example, Sanchez, Fornerino and Zhang did a survey among 477 students who respectively studied in United States, France and China. This survey suggests that the students studied in these three countries have following barriers such as family barriers, financial barriers, psychological barriers and social barriers. The psychological barriers relate to aspects such as homesickness or the fear of the new environment and the social barriers usually relate to friends and family. Different students are various in degree of these problem.

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