ABSTRACT
The national ministers in charge of higher education of the majority of European countries agreed in the late 1990s to embark on reforms on the way towards a “European Higher Education Area”. The major aim was to increase and enhance international student mobility, whereby the establishment of a convergent system of “cycles” of study programmes should be the major operational objective. Actually, the spread of the bachelor-master structure seems to have triggered an increase of degree mobility from outside Europe to Europe in the early years of the so-called “Bologna Process”. This, however, slowed down subsequently. Moreover, the Bologna Process has not led to a growing pace of intra-European degree mobility. Since 2009, a new target is in the limelight: By 2020, 20% of graduates should have had international experience through study or internship in another country for at least some period. Actually, however, the rate of the event of student mobility during the course of study had been already quite high in many European countries around 2000 and did not increase further substantially thereafter. Thus, the quantitative target is a challenge for some countries with low outwards mobility. Altogether, the Bologna Process rather seems to have improved the conditions and the quality of intra-European mobility more substantially than its quantitative development.
