Escaping Homelands with Limited Employment and Tertiary Education Opportunities: Outbound Student Mobility from Post-Soviet Countries

Abstract

Despite the phenomenal growth in the numbers of international students, research focusing on mobile students from post-Soviet countries is still extremely scarce. This paper offers an empirical investigation and theorisation of student mobility from post-Soviet countries to contribute to the growing body of research on the topic of international student mobility that so far has largely focused on English-speaking destination countries. Using secondary numeric data, I provide a snapshot of undergraduate student mobility differentials and examine whether particular characteristics of student home countries are associated with the proportion of their students studying abroad. The two variables of interest are the tertiary enrolments and the labour force participation of young people. The results show that countries with lower tertiary enrolments and lower labour force participation rates are more likely to have higher proportions of students studying abroad, when controlling for the population size and the GDP per capita. The regression model explains 77% of the variation in the outcome. The paper also examines the most popular destinations for students in order to show that their choices of destination countries seem to be somewhat limited and mainly revolve around countries within the region. I place the results in the context of scholarship on international student mobility and world-systems theory to discuss the implications for individual states and individual students. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.