EAIE 2021

EAIE 2021 – Conference

Laetitia POZNIAK a participé à la conférence EAIE 2021. Elle y a d’une part présenté sa recherche, menée en collaboration avec Mac DUHAMEL de l’UQTR, intitulée « Does international student mobility have an impact on labour market entry? ».

The internationalization of higher education is often seen as a strategy that better prepares students for employment in the increasingly globalized labor market of the 21st century. This  perspective is so widely shared by governments, employers, universities and students, that the employment-enhancing competencies being developed by transnational educational mobility (TEM) programs, also commonly referred to as international student mobility programs, are often taken for granted. But despite the great deal of support for this idea in the public discourse, the consensus appears more firmly grounded on a great number of subjective experiential anecdotes and on long-standing Western beliefs in the educational virtues of foreign travel than on empirical evidence (Waibel et al, 2017). In this paper, we investigate empirically if business and economics graduates who participate in TEM programs experience a faster transition into the labor market. Using a unique database of 6 cohorts of business and economics graduates from the Warocqué School of Business and Economics in Belgium, our results show that students participation in TEM programs such as Erasmus+ is conducive to a substantial and statistically significant decrease of nearly 50% in the average number of months required to get a job after graduation and that this effect is more important than the effect of obtaining better grades. This paper fills a small but important gap in the literature on the effect of TEM on employment transition after graduation. Given that our data originates from an in-house survey of business and economics graduates in a French-speaking university of Belgium, a relatively small and open European economy, our results suggest that the net relative benefits from TEM on the human, social and symbolic capital of business and economics graduates in the local and national labor market could be larger than those found in previous studies for larger economies such as Germany or Italy.

D’autre part, elle a participé aux divers meeting en ligne visant la rencontre de partenaires Erasmus et a développé de nouveaux contacts, notamment avec le Japon.