In recent years, policymakers have increasingly recognised the need to address the topic of graduate mobility and to understand the extent to which individuals move from their original place of residence for study and/or work. More equitable growth may be harder to achieve if parts of a region or a country continuously risks “brain drain” rather than “brain circulation” benefits.

Given that the current phase of globalization forces national economies and their regional networks to frame new economic and social objectives and sometimes even to adapt cornerstones of their previous development, deep changes are taking place in order to cope with the future evolution. This means that even labour markets and educational systems are involved in this deep transformation process and the creeping transformation of higher educational systems in Europe, as in its most important partners and competitors, namely the USA and China, is becoming in fact a vector of a multilayer strategy, concerning the reconsideration of traditional boundaries: between academic disciplines, between social groups and between public and private engagement. This, among other things, implies the re-conceptualisation of the theoretical frame focused only on the notion of employability and on the dismissal of vertical industrial policies. New and old methodological issues have to be addressed in an attempt to improve the quality of education, monitor in a more effective way the functioning of labour markets for graduates and track high skill migration through the utilisation of high quality and updated surveys and administrative data.

In this context, tracking mobile graduates is of growing importance for both institutions and systems at national and cross-border levels; perceived challenges for a comprehensive tracking system are represented by the harmonisation of definitions and indicators, the sharing of administrative data between home and destination countries, the integration of administrative data from different sources, the divergence in the national legislations related to data protection, data handling and storage.

In EU Member States and EEA countries, an analysis of the state of graduate tracking policies and practices in the EU 2020 shows that there is considerable room for improvement and inclusion of mobile graduates in tracking measures.

In this context, the European Network of Graduate Tracking recently established a Working Group on “Tracking mobile graduates” to support the exploration of European-level graduate tracking and provide strategic input in the ongoing discussion on the concepts and methodology to be adopted to ensure comparability and reliability of data.

The topic of international mobility of students and graduates was also the main focus of the international conference “Tracking graduates and their mobility: comparing experiences in the international framework” organised by AlmaLaurea in cooperation with the University of Bologna on 1 December 2023.

The conference was attended by experts from the European Commission, the Asian Development Bank, the Centre for Research in Higher Education Policies (CIPES), the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW), Georgetown University, University of Warwick, the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR), the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT), University of Bologna (UNA Europa Unit), University of Pavia (Coimbra Group) and University of Torino (UNITA).

The discussion focused on two mechanisms of transformation of higher educational systems: i) transformation implemented through promotion of, and incentives to, intranational and international comparisons of best practices and performance in terms of graduate employment conditions; and ii) transformation implemented through support and incentives to cooperation initiatives in the teaching, research and innovation programmes of universities.

The conference sessions allowed the participants to deep dive into the core themes in the ongoing discussion on tracking mobile graduates:

• setting the scene of graduate tracking and mobile graduate tracking as relevant means for facing global higher education changes in an international context;     
• theoretical approaches and methodological issues experienced in restructuring higher education systems and operating quantitative assessments, by means of survey data and administrative data, for monitoring graduate employment conditions and internationally mobile graduates; and
• focus on the European Higher Education Area, by exploring the potential relations and interactions between the European graduate tracking initiative and the European Universities alliances.

The conference also provided an occasion to present some of the most recent findings of AlmaLaurea on the topic of students’ and graduates’ international mobility, as reported below. Data come from the two latest surveys conducted by AlmaLaurea in 2022. Findings are presented in the next article.