Impact of international student mobility on international profile of jobs

Abstract

While the impact of international student mobility (ISM) on vertical labour market outcomes, such as wages and employment, has been widely studied, less is known about the impact of ISM on horizontal outcomes, such as job characteristics. We contribute to filling this gap by studying whether ISM experience is associated with having a job with an international profile, in terms of job content in the domestic labour market or working abroad. We analyse a large-scale Norwegian survey, enabling us to compare mobile to non-mobile master’s graduates 3 years after graduation while controlling for a rich set of demographic and educational characteristics. We find that graduates who pursued their entire degree abroad and graduates who undertook a part of their degree abroad are respectively 19–22 and 3–5 percentage points more likely to work abroad than their non-mobile peers. Moreover, both groups of mobile students have jobs with more internationally oriented features in the domestic labour market. In contrast to expectation, however, there were no significant differences between graduates with a full degree abroad and graduates with a shorter stay abroad regarding the latter aspect.