Abstract
Chapter 3 questions the effectiveness of European strategic ambitions to improve young peoples’ mobility and access to education, and maximise the value of the ‘educational experience’, due to structural flaws in the governance of tertiary education systems. This is due to a growing preference for global competition at a time of shrinking job markets, thereby limiting the range of opportunities for ever greater numbers of highly qualified young people. While a conservative view that individual resilience and hard work are sufficient continues to be promoted, the competitive nature of labour markets means that not all those who succeed in education find work commensurate to their skill and qualification levels. That not everyone achieves individualised success leads us to ask if an expanded and more mobile education system is actually making society, as opposed to one specific sub-section of society, socially and economically better off.
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- 1.
International students also spend significant amounts of money in host countries; for example, one study has estimated that foreign students contributed $12 billion to the US economy (Davis, 2003).
- 2.
However, and perhaps unsurprisingly, our ability to draw conclusions about this issue is limited due to the poor quality of the data and a lack of true international comparability with regard to estimating drop out rates in Europe, with few countries accurately reporting on retention, drop out and time-to-degree rates (European Commission, 2015b, p. 8).
- 3.
This is a process frequently referred to in pejorative terms, for example, as ‘over-education’ (Eichhorst and Neder, 2014).
- 4.
Croll (2008) also argues that, in the UK, these initially disadvantaged young graduates pretty much continue to be disadvantaged and, despite the fact that the ‘choice’ of work on offer is real, they are heavily constrained from realising it.
- 5.
When taken to its political extreme, we find many calls for ‘reform’ of pan-European economics, integration, open-border immigration and multiculturalism, the principles that have shaped the development of Europe since World War II. Somewhat surprisingly, these calls tend to be most visible in some of the most economically comfortable and politically stable European countries, with far right political parties, such as the French National Front, Dutch Freedom Party, British National Party and Swiss Peoples Party, all enjoying some degree of success. The tide of this xenophobic treatment is mostly directed at other European or ‘white’ immigrants, particularly Albanians, Bosnians, Greeks, Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Poles, Russians and Romanians, as well as newly arrived refugees from war-torn countries. Their support is thought be derived from citizens who feel threatened by rapid changes in post-industrial societies, the ‘losers of modernity’ (Betz, 1998), who feel threatened by rapid social change. Even Germany, Europe’s economically most successful nation and a country that has admitted more refugees than any other EU region, now harbours the Alternative Für Deutschland, a far right party which has gathered swift support since its inception in 2013.
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Cairns, D., Cuzzocrea, V., Briggs, D., Veloso, L. (2017). New Dilemmas in Europe’s Race for Global Talent: A Wrong Turn for Tertiary Education?. In: The Consequences of Mobility. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46741-2_3
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