1. International Student Mobility Statistics Task Force Recommendations of the Task Force
Luxembourg, 5 May 2011
Bech building

2. Introduction
The recommendations of the Task Force concern 4 broad issues with regard to mobility statistics:
A) general recommendations: policy demands, statistical sources, financial support and further methodological and data collection development
B) credit mobility: development of data collection, definitions and concepts, and data collection table including breakdowns
C) diploma/degree mobility: definitions and concepts, development of the UOE data collection, data tables
D) initial vocational education and training (IVET) mobility: definitions and concepts (including scope), policy demands, and further developments
International Student Mobility Statistics Task Force

3. Introduction
The Task Force recommendations are the output of the mandate and work programme as approved by the Education and Training Statistics Working, November 2010 (see docs ‘ETS WG 10_04 student mobility’ and ’02_2011 Studmob Mandate & timetable’)
The recommendations of the Task Force have been developed through 2 Task Force meetings in January and May 2011.
The Task Force have analysed the completed country replies on the ‘Survey to ETS and UOE national coordinators on international student mobility statistics’ and are basing their recommendations on this analysis.
The recommendations are destined for the Education and Training Statistics Working Group meeting May The Working Group is invited to approve the recommendations and decide on further actions in this regard.
International Student Mobility Statistics Task Force

4. A. General recommendations
The Task Force recommends that the policy framework for the statistical demands is well explained and justified for the development work at national level. This concerns in particular the EU2020 and ET2020 strategies and the education and labour market aspects.
Resource issues and the administrative burden need to be carefully assessed for all new development work on diploma, credit and IVET mobility. In particular, new/modified data collections at institutional level should be subjected to careful cost-benefit and risk analysis.
International Student Mobility Statistics Task Force

5. A. General recommendations
The Task Force recommends careful analysis of the preferred ESS source for collecting data on credit and IVET mobility. Relevant sources are the UOE, the EU-LFS and the AES. This work should be done with priority by the end of 2011, before further detailed work on the UOE is carried out. Source preferences should be policy guided and emphasise the educational and/or labour market issues related to the EU2020 strategy and the May 2009 Council Decision (‘ET2020’). The Task Force therefore recommends that the EU Commission internally look at this issue in depth.
International Student Mobility Statistics Task Force

6. A. General recommendations
The Task Force recommends that if financial support from Eurostat for the development of data sources on international learning mobility is foreseen, the needs for EU financial resources should be planned well in advance and guidance in grant procedures, in the form of training or likewise, should be provided to the relevant institutions (NSIs / ministries of education).
International Student Mobility Statistics Task Force

7. A. General recommendations
The Task Force recommends to develop by the end of 2012 a methodological manual on learning mobility covering both diploma and credit mobility which could subsequently be integrated into the UOE manual (the essentials).
It is important that specific cases are treated in the manual - such as mobility of doctorate students, treatment of field work at sites in a country different from the one where the institution is located, apprenticeships/traineeships, language courses, etc.
This new separate and more detailed manual on the subject should be used to improve the UOE manual sections on methodology and measurement of learning mobility.
International Student Mobility Statistics Task Force

8. A. General recommendations
The Task Force recommends creating a new Task Force with a mandate to:
make a more detailed assessment of the availability of data on international credit mobility in the LLP national agencies,
finalise the credit mobility methodology, contributing to the making of the mobility methodological manual and
run a pilot collection of both data and metadata on credit mobility.
This new Task Force should meet twice during 2012 and finish its work by the end of the year. This 2012 Task Force should ideally be supported by resources at EU level, e.g. through external consultancy with expertise in methodology and data treatment.
This new 2012 mobility Task Force should include other stakeholders, namely participants from the LLP national agencies.
International Student Mobility Statistics Task Force

9. B. Credit mobility – Data collection development
Given the Council decision of May 2009 (‘ET2020’), requesting the Commission to propose an EU benchmark on international student mobility, and the Commission response (as known May 2011), the Task Force recommends that the policy follow-up (the adoption or not of a benchmark by the Council) be clarified by the end of Respecting this timing would be essential in order to feed into the corresponding development of the statistical processes.
Given that no other suitable sources exist within the ESS, the Task Force recommends introducing a Eurostat specific UOE table on credit mobility (same status as UOE language and regional tables). The Task Force recommends that the UOE data collection on credit mobility should be obligatory from 2014 with a possibility for derogations until 2016 or 2017, however possible increases in costs and administrative burden should be carefully studied and evaluated before any firm decisions are taken (risk analysis and cost/benefit analysis).
International Student Mobility Statistics Task Force

10. B. Credit mobility – Data collection development
The survey results show that data on credit mobility are available and accessible in the LLP national agencies. Therefore, so as to minimise any additional administrative burden, the Task Force recommends the UOE data providers using these data for efficiency reasons and for avoiding doing double work. A broader use of the LLP agency data and as a source of official statistics would be expected to lead to quality improvements of these data and a better documentation (meta-data). The Task Force recommends to underline these aspects in the further work.
Furthermore, recognising that the network of LLP national agencies provide an important data collection framework, the Task Force recommends that the LLP agencies are invited to also collect data on credit mobility programmes other than those supported by the EU Commission (as presently done in some countries). This would be efficient in relation to the UOE network although national specific situations may diverge from this situation.
The Task Force recommends to check for any confidentiality problems in using LLP agency data; however it expects that this would not be a problem and underlines that the ESS has the tools for dealing with possible issues (including recommendations on the anonymisation of data).
International Student Mobility Statistics Task Force

11. B. Credit mobility – Data collection development
The Task-Force recognises that producing credit mobility values from graduate data might, in most countries, require new data collections from educational institutions, with an increase in administrative burden. Therefore, the Task Force recommends that an assessment is made of the possibility of producing estimates of graduate credit mobility based on student (enrolment) credit mobility or any other data which can be used for such estimation; this includes the possibility of producing a synthetic indicator of graduate credit mobility based on student credit mobility.
International Student Mobility Statistics Task Force

12. B. Credit mobility – concepts and definitions
The Task Force recommends that the definition of credit mobility should emphasise that the mobility to be counted is recognised by the home institution/educational authority. This also follows the revised ISCED 2011 line.
The Task Force recommends to underline in the definition of credit mobility that the interest is focused on physical mobility and not ’virtual’ (distance learning) mobility.
The Task Force recommends to further specify the treatment of joint programmes spanning across national borders including clarifying the terminology. This would include a definition of what a ’home institution’ is in terms of length of stay / residence / or record tracking.
The Task Force recommends that when the same graduate was involved in diploma mobility and credit mobility, he should be classified in either diploma mobility or credit mobility according to the type of mobility responsible for the longest time spent abroad.
International Student Mobility Statistics Task Force

13. B. Credit mobility – concepts and definitions
DG EAC has experience with concepts and definitions which could be applicable for statistical purposes for credit mobility. The Task Force recommends to assess these and use them if appropriate. The minimum duration threshold for credit mobility is one example of a potentially useful definition.
The Task Force recommends that, as a starting point, the minimum duration criteria for credit mobility should be three months for the new ISCED 2011 levels 6, 7 and 8. It should be 2 months for work placements at level 5 (mainly current 5B). If duration is not available, 15 ECTS points would be the minimum threshold.
However, taking into account potential further developments at policy level a uniform threshold of 3 months at tertiary level should be confirmed as the operational definition. If the number of credits is used as a proxy for the duration of a mobility period abroad then it should be converted into a full time study equivalent.
International Student Mobility Statistics Task Force

14. B. Credit mobility – concepts and definitions
The Task Force recommends to assess the possibility of creating a synthetic indicator of graduates’ credit mobility using student (enrolment) credit mobility for one year and the average number of years students spend in tertiary education. Such a synthetic indicator, if adopted, should be used for all countries and not compare countries with a synthetic indicator with others with real data.
The Task Force recommends that any developments of estimations methods or synthetic indicators on graduates credit mobility should clearly indicate the underlying assumptions.
The Task Force recommends that the testing of graduate estimations or a synthetic indicator on graduates mobility should be done in parallel with testing the collection costs of the ’real’ data at institutional level.
International Student Mobility Statistics Task Force

15. B. Credit mobility – table
The Task Force recommends that credit mobility is broken down by ISCED level but questions the need for a breakdown by the length of staying abroad.
The Task Force recommends to break down credit mobility (outbound) by country of destination.
The Task Force recommends that for any other breakdown, coherence between the breakdowns used for diploma and credit mobility should be assured.
The Task Force recommends that users at policy level should be consulted concerning the breakdowns to be used in credit mobility data (and subsequently to be confirmed by the ETS WG).
International Student Mobility Statistics Task Force

16. C. Diploma mobility
The Task Force recommends not using foreign citizenship as a substitute for learning mobility data, even if it is used as a proxy. However, before the collection of data on foreign citizenship is abandoned the completeness of learning mobility should be improved and an assessment of the needs of data on citizenship on its own and not as proxy for mobility should be made. Therefore, this situation should be evaluated again in 2014.
The Task Force recommends to start the process of making UOE mobility tables obligatory in Commission regulation 88/2011. The timing could be for 2014 with the possibility for derogations to 2016 (or 2017), however possible increases in costs and administrative burdens should be carefully studied and evaluated before any firm decisions are taken (risk analysis and cost/benefit analysis).
International Student Mobility Statistics Task Force

17. C. Diploma mobility
Even if the majority of the Task Force members would consider ’homecoming nationals’ as being part of mobile students (as do policy makers at EU and Bologna Process level), around half of the countries which replied to the survey have the opposite opinion. This could mean a separate identification if more definitions have to be used (at the moment in the UOE methodology ’homecoming nationals’ are not mobile students).
The Task Force recommends that analytical work is undertaken for listing the arguments for and against including homecoming nationals as mobile students. This should include analysing the data for the countries where homecoming students can be separately identified.
International Student Mobility Statistics Task Force

18. C. Diploma mobility
The Task Force recommends that the definition of learning mobility underlines that it concerns physical mobility moving across national borders. International distance learning students/graduates should therefore not be counted as mobile students, even if they are part of the student population in the country where the institution is located. Therefore, disregarding International distance learning students/graduates as mobile students has the consequence that the total student population minus the mobile students does not constitute the domestic students. As such, international distance learning students/graduates are a third category in addition to domestic students and mobile students.
In cases where a student is both a homecoming national and an international distance learner, he/she should not be counted as a mobile student because the status of distance learning takes priority.
International Student Mobility Statistics Task Force

19. C. Diploma mobility
The Task Force members did not put priority on the present UOE tables on mobility although it was underlined that ENRL9 and ENRL6 are important for national purposes.
The Task Force did not consider that a lower frequency of collecting the data would mean a lower administrative burden given the widespread use of administrative registers for this kind of data.
The priority of the UOE mobility tables should in principle be set by the policy requirements given the continuing high priority (as in the case of the EU2020 policy/youth on the move flagship).
International Student Mobility Statistics Task Force

20. D. IVET mobility
The task-force recommends to abolish the parts of the UOE table GRAD1 concerning student mobility and foreign citizenship, as they do not fulfil present policy requirements and very few data are available.
The Task Force recommends a medium to longer term development strategy; first point would be to study country specific examples (for example FI, DE, other (?)) as well as the outcome of the on-going ICON-institute study (sponsored by the Commission).
The Task Force recommends that an attempt is made to use the LLP national agencies for collecting bilateral/regional agreement data apart from the ones currently collected concerning the EU mobility programmes. Involvement of UOE data providers should be decided at a later stage.
The Task Force recommends that the use of the UOE as the appropriate tool to produce IVET mobility statistics is assessed having in mind the policy requirements. Other statistical sources may be an alternative tool.
International Student Mobility Statistics Task Force