The Long Walk to Knowledge: On the Determinants of Higher Education Mobility to Europe

This paper investigates the determinants of demand for higher education mobility from students in developing countries to Europe. Used together with various linguistic relations, we emphasise the relevance of informal and formal networks in explaining resistance to student migration. The former are made up of friends or previous students while the latter are formal partnerships that have been established among higher education institutions. Overall, our results show that, apart from the usual economic considerations, student mobility is strongly correlated with non-monetary factors specific to origin and destination, such as socio-demographic characteristics, individual beliefs, and institutional profiles.