ABSTRACT
To address this gap in our knowledge, this chapter draws on 85 in-depth individual interviews collected as part of a British Academy-sponsored project on ‘International Higher Education and the Mobility of UK Students’. In it, we explore the decision-making processes of British young people who chose to study abroad for the whole of their undergraduate or postgraduate education, and compare their motivations and experiences to those of their counterparts from mainland Europe, documented in the wider literature. The chapter begins, then, with a discussion of this literature, which has focussed on European mobility policy, patterns of student mobility across Europe, and the motivations and experiences of European students. We then proceed to discuss the particular case of UK students in relation to our study fi ndings, examining trends in student mobility, before focussing on their motivations and experiences. Throughout, comparisons are drawn with what we know about the educational mobility of European young people more generally.
