Students in unequal exchange: The European social space of Erasmus student mobility

Abstract

The Erasmus program stands as one of the successes in European Union cultural integration. This article analyzes the patterns of student exchanges between European universities to understand their homological relations to principles of differentiation in the European social space. Using Bourdieu’s relational approach, we conceptualize the patterns of Erasmus exchanges as European power relations and how both universities and students perceive and enact symbolic recognition and hierarchies. We analyze data from Erasmus exchanges from 2008 to 2014 using network analysis and multiple correspondance analysis. We show that the student exchanges are strongly stratified along axes homologous with structures of academic prestige, as well as economic and social differentiation in Europe. Erasmus exchange students follow patterns that are homologous with economic differentiation, and we also find within-country differences between universities, with dominant universities orienting themselves toward the dominant pole in the European social space. We show that the European field of higher education is highly hierarchical and homologically structured regarding cultural exchange, not only along lines of economic differences. This underlines that cultural and symbolic recognition and hierarchy are important for understanding how universities and students take positions in this European social space. Theoretically, the article shows how student-exchange structures are homologous along lines of other forms of domination, providing privilege to the already privileged.