The impact of socio-economic and educational background on expectations and concerns towards students’ international mobility

There is a widely shared perception among politicians and higher education institutions that studying abroad is beneficial to university students’ personal development, foreign languages skills and employability. However, data indicate that international mobility varies widely across students by field of study, by gender, by socio-economic and educational background. This evidence calls for increasing public efforts focused on reducing the social selectivity of studying abroad and the learning mobility barriers still existing. Within this context, the aim of this contribution is to investigate the impact of socio-economic and educational background on expectations and concerns towards studying abroad. To study in depth expectations and concerns, we use data collected by an on-line survey administered to students who apply to international mobility. We collected data on 1272 students of a medium size Italian university – the University of Bergamo – that applied for an Erasmus+ or Extra-EU Program in the last five academic years before the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic. The results of the survey on applicants’ expectations and concerns are successively merged with administrative information at enrolment (e.g., age, gender, field of study, geographical area of origin, previous school background, etc.). Using the principal component analysis, we reduce the number of subjective variables of the survey and then the selected components are explained by the objective variables using regression models. Our preliminary analysis shows heterogeneous results: expectations and concerns towards a study experience abroad characterize in different measure students belonging to different groups (by gender, degree, family background, geographical area of origin, …).