“Participation in international education mobility programmes enhances environmental awareness”

Let’s start with the basics of your analysis: What prompted your research question, and what methodological approach did you take in conducting the analysis?

While the number of works conducting quantitative research on the individual effects of studying abroad has considerably increased in the past decade, the vast majority focus on well-defined outcomes that can be readily observed and measured. For instance, several national graduate surveys collect information on whether graduates participated in study abroad programmes during their university studies and record subsequent labour market outcomes, such as employment and earnings. By contrast, much less attention has been paid to outcomes that are more difficult to define and measure. One such example is the widely held view that studying abroad fosters global citizenship. Although this claim is well established in the literature, there is still no clear consensus on what global citizenship entails or how it can be meaningfully quantified.

In an effort to partially address this knowledge gap, in my article I investigate whether an international education experience raises young people’s awareness of environmental issues. Exposure to host country’s cultural norms and values, together with interactions with fellow international participants, may encourage young people to recognize the interconnected nature of environmental challenges and the collective responsibility of citizens to address them.

To empirically test the above hypothesis, I use data from a Flash Eurobarometer survey and I employ propensity score matching techniques. The advantage of these statistical methods is that they attempt to correct for the potential selection problem associated with studying abroad: observable and unobservable individual characteristics that drive the decision to undertake an international education experience may also be related to pro-environmental attitudes. In other words, these techniques try to isolate the effect of interest by taking into account pre-exisiting differences in sustainability mindsets between individuals who decided to have an educational experience abroad and those who did not.

In your view, what are the key findings of the analysis? And were there any results that surprised you?

My empirical results suggest that participation in international education mobility programmes enhances environmental awareness. This effect is modest in size, but it is statistically significant. More specifically, my propensity score matching estimates indicate that young people in the EU who had an educational experience in another EU country are between 2 and 4.8 percentage points more likely to rank environmental concerns among the three priorities the EU should focus on than comparable young people without such an experience.

A key strength of my findings is their robustness, a property that is not always observed in empirical analyses. Having taken part in an international education experience is consistently found to have a positive effect on environmental concerns. Additionally, the magnitude of this effect is relatively stable across different propensity score estimators.

A possible explanation for the relatively modest estimated effect is that it reflects the average of two distinct underlying effects. On the one hand, an education experience abroad may have little influence on young individuals who already held strong pro-environmental attitudes before studying in another EU country. Given the positive selection into studying abroad, these individuals are likely to constitute the majority of participants, leaving little room for further improvement in their environmental attitudes. On the other hand, the same experience may have a much larger impact on young people who had weaker pro-environmental attitudes before going abroad. Although this group is likely to represent only a small share of learning abroad participants, they may experience substantial changes in their sustainability mindset as a result of their international education experience.

Finally, based on your findings, what conclusions and recommendations for action can be drawn for higher education policy and practice?

The findings of my article have at least three relevant implications.

First, they show how challenging it is to carry out a comprehensive evaluation of individual effects of studying abroad. Participation in an international education experience is associated with a wide range of outcomes, some of which are readily observable and measurable, whereas others are more difficult to define and quantify.

Second, by identifying an additional benefit of educational experiences abroad, my results provide further general support for policies aimed at encouraging more students to participate in such experiences. In this respect, these findings are consistent with the EU’s target of ensuring that at least 23% of higher education graduates have had a learning mobility experience abroad by 2030.

Third, as stated above, it is possible that the environmentally enhancing effects of international education programmes may be substantial among those young people who, before going abroad, had weak environmental attitudes and who currently represent a minority of learning abroad participants. This interpretation may lend support to the EU’s existing target that at least 20% of participants in learning mobility programmes by 2027 should be people with fewer opportunities, who may particularly benefit from exposure to an international educational environment.