2007:09 R

Student mobility

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the international mobility of university students

Statistics regarding the flow of students have been previously reported in various publications. Providing information about both incoming and outgoing students in the same report makes it easier to follow student mobility from a Swedish perspective. Furthermore, here for the first time a new measure of differences in mobility between degree programmes and between universities has been used.

First there is a description of the growing global education market which, according to the OECD publication Education at a Glance, amounted to almost 2.7 million mobile students in 2004. ‘ Mobilestudents´ means here students who studied in countries other than the one they are a citizen of. Compared to 2000, the number of mobile students in the world has increased by 41 percent. The number of mobile students has also increased with regard to Sweden.

During academic year 2004/05, just under 27 000 Swedish students studied abroad with student aid from CSN (the Swedish National Board for Student Aid). This number has remained at around 27 000 since 1997/98. The number of incoming students to Sweden has more than doubled in the same period, and for academic year 2004/05 there were over 23 000 students from other countries at undergraduate level in Sweden. In total, the number of incoming students is now almost as large as the number of outgoing.

The most popular destinations for Swedish students are the UK ,USA and Spain, which together take 45 percent of outgoing students. Since 1997/98, however, there have been changes in the choice of study country. These days, fewer choose the USA , while more and more choose countries like Australia and Denmark.

A large proportion of incoming students toSwedencome fromGermany ,Finlandand France, which together were responsible for almost a quarter of incoming students in 2004/05. Since 1997/98, numbers of foreign students have increased from all continents, especially fromAsia . The number of students fromAsiahas increased fivefold.

By measuring how large a proportion of graduates studied abroad in the six year period before they graduated, it is possible to gauge how popular it is to study abroad. Of those who graduated 2004/05, an average of 13 percent studied abroad, but there are large differences between the various groups. Almost half of graduate architects and almost a third of law graduates and Bachelor´s/Master´s students doing economics have studied abroad. There is a considerably lower percentage who have studied abroad among graduate teachers and nurses, under five percent.

The amount of study abroad is often proportional to the number of exchange programmes available, which in turn is very dependent upon whether the subject is international in character. The age of students is also very much linked to the tendency to study abroad. Of the 2004/05 graduates, more than a quarter of 26-year-olds had studied abroad, but of those over 34, almost none had done so.

The differences in the extent of foreign studies among degree groups is also an important explanation as to why student mobility differs from university to university. It is because universities offer different programmes.

In relative terms, mobility is highest at Handelshögskolan in Stockholm (The Stockholm School of Economics), nearly all of whose educational programmes include Economics. The mobility index of this university was over 23 percent for academic year 2004/05, i.e. of all the students at the university that year, 23 percent were either abroad or from abroad.

At a further ten universities, the mobility index was ten percent or higher. Of these, three are arts colleges and three are colleges of technology. These universities both offer degrees in subjects where a large percentage of the graduates have studied abroad and they have a large percentage of incoming students.

Since 2001/02, the mobility index for the whole country has increased from 5.8 percent to 7.7 percent in 2004/05. For the various universities, however, developments in mobility index differ during this period. Some have an unchanged mobility index while most of the universities now have a higher index than before. This is primarily because the number of incoming students has increased considerably especially at several of the technical universities and colleges.

Many Swedish universities and colleges have thus increased their recruitment of students from other countries and at present every seventeenth student in Sweden is an incoming student.