Working for Europe? Managing Erasmus+ in the Austerity Era

Abstract

Chapter 4 focuses on student mobility, using the example of the Erasmus undergraduate exchange platform to explain how this form of movement has come to be dominated by young people from well-off backgrounds, who tend to possess high levels of social and economic capital as well as being pre-attuned to the values associated with the European institutions. For this reason, Erasmus inevitably fails to spread employability or advance inter-cultural understanding and Europeanisation objectives since movers are already in possession of these attributes. For education professionals working for Erasmus in national contexts subject to austerity, long-standing challenges in mobility governance relating to bureaucratic and resource issues, and inequalities in the regional distribution of resources for the programme, are heightened by economic pressures on economic crisis-hit families. This situation greatly reduces the number of student candidates for outward mobility, explaining the growing disparities in levels of circulation between different European countries.