Academic Mobility: A policy model to compare and assess national policies

International mobility within academia (AM) has been at the center of political and policy discourse for a long while, and it became so far salient in additional context such as Asia, Middle East and South America. Mobility is also strongly linked to structural reforms such as the market introduction in HE in UK and Australia in the eighties, the introduction three tier degree cycle in Europe the following decade and the more recent development of HE in a number of South East Asian countries. In spite of such worldwide relevance, researchers nor policy makers or stakeholders involved came up with a framework of assessment to study and compare different experiences regarding the management of academic mobility. This paper seeks to address this weakness providing a comprehensive qualitative framework to study, measure and compare such national experiences. The pandemic outbreak acted as a wakeup call in relation to the intrinsic complexity of managing AM flows, strongly interrelated to national foreign policy, migration and the labour market, research, development and innovation policies, plus those fields concerning social protection, health, tourism and even defense at different levels of policy making. In light of these motivations, this paper proposes an ideal type of Integrated Policy on Academic Mobility (IPAM) which fully encompass the multi-sectorial and multi-level character of AM. This also help to link academic mobility in HE to important reforms and more generally ongoing processes of transformation in other policy sectors, in the first place those of migration and innovation. The work is based on the contribution by ACA (2012), which proposed a first description of national policy on academic mobility, and on preliminary work by the Unesco (2013, 2015). The ideal type developed is based on four main pillars, notably i) the presence of strong political commitment toward a transversal goal, ii) the establishment of dedicated bodies/the repartition of tasks among domestic bodies, iii) the presence of a comprehensive legislative framework, of technology and resources, and iv) the extent of coherence in sectorial objectives, instruments and frames across levels and sectors of policy making. Each pillar is in turn based on a range of additional indicators. Basing on this ideal type, a qualitative framework of assessment has also been developed. Beyond its relevance for comparative policy research, the ideal type and its related framework of assessment may offer precious guidance to policy makers engaged with the development or adjustment of national policies to promote academic mobility.