Travelling Ideas and Policies through the Lens of Admission Policies: A Socio-Historical Perspective Contribution

Post-secondary education is today perceived as witnessing an increased internationalisation supporting processes of convergence between HEI’s. Adopting a long-term historical perspective suggests that not only this has been the case since the creation of the first universities, but that periods of closeness can also be analysed as expressing converging processes. This is for example illustrated by changing students’ possibilities to access HEI’s of various political territories, which depend on admission policies and the territories of circulation they frame. Focusing on these dimensions over the very long run, this communication explores how the diffusion and translation of admission policies over time in Europe result from various mechanisms of diffusion taking place at different levels: socio-historical events (Sewell, 1996) or massive disruptions (Scheidel, 2017); student’s and professors’ circulations, as well as the relationships between the instituted powers of different political territories in which HEI’s are embedded.