Learning mobility in European higher education: How has the Union’s flagship initiative progressed?

Miguel Alves Pereira (), Giovanna D’Inverno () and Ana Santos Camanho ()
Additional contact information
Miguel Alves Pereira: Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa
Giovanna D’Inverno: Università di Pisa
Ana Santos Camanho: Universidade do Porto

Annals of Operations Research, 2025, vol. 351, issue 2, No 14, 1589-1619

Abstract: Abstract In 2010, the European Commission set out the development of an economy based on knowledge and innovation as one of the priorities of its Europe 2020 strategy for smart, sustainable, and inclusive growth. This culminated in the ‘Youth on the Move’ flagship initiative, aimed at enhancing the performance and international attractiveness of Europe’s higher education institutions and raising the Union’s overall education and training levels. Therefore, it is relevant to assess the performance of the ‘Youth on the Move’ initiative via the creation of composite indicators (CIs) and, ultimately, monitor the progress made by European countries in creating a positive environment supporting learner mobility. For this reason, we make use of the CI-building ‘Benefit-of-the-Doubt’ approach, in its robust and conditional setting to account for outliers and the human development of those nations, to exploit the European Commission’s Mobility Scoreboard framework between 2015/2016 and 2022/2023. Furthermore, we incorporate the value judgements of experts in the sector to construct utility scales and compute weight restrictions through multi-criteria decision analysis. This enables the conversion of ordinal scales into interval ones based on knowledgeable information about reality in higher education. In the end, the results point to a slight performance improvement, but highlight the need to improve the ‘Recognition of learning outcomes’, ‘Foreign language preparation’, and ‘Information and guidance’.

Keywords: Benefit-of-the-Doubt; Composite indicators; Utility scales; European education systems; Learning mobility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10479-024-06195-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:annopr:v:351:y:2025:i:2:d:10.1007_s10479-024-06195-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10479

DOI: 10.1007/s10479-024-06195-y

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of Operations Research is currently edited by Endre Boros

More articles in Annals of Operations Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().