Effects of Mobility Programmes on University Students' Academic Performance

The number of students participating in mobility programmes has increased enormously over the years. The reasons are diverse and may range from personal growth to better employability prospects, together with improvement in foreign language skills and intercultural awareness. Mobility programmes receive generous funding from the European Commission, therefore their outcomes should be measured and evaluated. This paper focuses on a specific one: the academic effects of mobility programmes. We analyse whether there is an improvement in the academic performance of the students who participate in mobility programmes and, if this is the case, whether it is sustained over time. We use a broad dataset of students from the Faculty of Economics of the University of Valencia over a period of thirteen academic years. The results indicate that students participating in a mobility programme experiment a marked improvement in their scores at the host university, but this upgrading: a) is not homogeneous across the mobility programs or geographical areas considered; and b) partially vanishes off when the students come back to their home university.