Policies supporting international student mobility prepare young people for the challenges
of global and multicultural environments. However, disadvantaged students have lower
participation rates in mobility schemes, and hence benefit less from their positive impacts
on career progression. Therefore, policy makers aim to make mobility programmes
more inclusive. Nevertheless, it is far from clear how policy design can achieve this aim.
This study investigates factors driving unequal mobility uptake. It goes beyond existing
research by not only focusing on individual choices but also on university characteristics,
like university segregation, excellence and student support. In addition, the study is novel
in comparing rich graduate survey and administrative data merged with university level
ETER data across four countries. Multilevel regression results show consistently across all
countries that disadvantaged students do not only lose out on mobility experience due to
their background but also due to them being clustered in universities with lower mobility
opportunities. Universities' support and excellence while important for explaining mobility
uptake do not appear to mitigate unequal uptake in any of the countries examined.