The Politics Behind and the Value of Outbound Student Mobility: Is Canada Missing the Boat?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between 2005 and 2017, outbound student mobility (OSM)—study abroad—increasingly became part of government policy across Europe and the G7 countries. Canada, however, was absent from this OSM policy movement. Instead, its national and provincial governments concentrated on attracting and retaining international students. This study explores Canada’s absence by examining the OSM policy process and the values attributed to OSM by policymakers in key ministries as well as leaders in key advocacy groups. An international comparative study, it comprises six jurisdictions: Canadian federal level, Ontario, Quebec, Germany, England, and France (the latter three as OSM public policy leaders). OSM from a public policy perspective is a virtually unexplored area in internationalization and higher education research. To understand the politics behind and the value of outbound student mobility, this mixed-methods study analyzes 1,940 policy and advocacy documents as well as interview data from 74 participants. It scrutinizes OSM issue-attention at the agenda-setting stage of the policy cycle and uses social discourse analysis to examine the extent to which OSM value-conceptions can be situated within neoliberalism, realism, and/or cosmopolitanism. Notably, it sectorally orients and conceptually differentiates policy and advocacy communities, and renews with societal value-goals as public policy drivers. Findings show that within Canada, the federal level conceptualized OSM as a value for the collective and was outward-looking, while the subnational jurisdictions (responsible for higher education) conceptualized it as a value for the individual and were inward-looking. Importantly, the federal and Ontario governments included a no-value OSM conceptualization. Conversely, each of the leading OSM jurisdictions in Europe overwhelmingly conceptualized OSM as a value for the collective, firmly anchored it historically, and was outward-looking. Finally, for policymakers, this study suggests three elements are needed to successfully implement OSM public policy jurisdictionally: a champion within government, target setting, and systems-level data collection.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".