RESPONSIBLE ENTREPRENEURSHIP VISION DEVELOPMENT AND ETHICS

422 RESPONSIBLE ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Conclusion
During the last decades, studying abroad has become a relatively common experience in
both Europe and the worldwide. More recently, once Romania has joined the EU and the borders
were largely open, educational mobility became easy and handy for Romanian students
too. Still, despite the constantly growing number of Romanian young people who choose to
study at a university abroad, empirical evidence on how academic mobility programs may
affect students’ behavior regarding their labor market decisions is very limited. Moreover,
students’ own opinions with regard to the utility of an exchange experience during higher
education in their transition from education to employment are only seldom discussed. Hence,
the present paper investigates how students perceive the influence of their academic mobility
in relation to labor market related opportunities and outcomes.
Main findings show that most of the students are highly convinced that their educational
stage in Europe may prove helpful in some unique ways in terms of skills improvement,
employment choices and career development. In this regard, they all depict mobility as a “transformative
experience” and as a key-action supporting future job opportunities, economic
growth and social progress.
Furthermore, consistent with previous studies, the present findings show that student mobility
programs are perceived as having a significant effect on young people’s desire and decision
to get a job abroad after graduation. Although the individual characteristics definitely
play an important role in determining students’ propensity for later labor migration, based
on students’ perspectives, the current work argues that being mobile during tertiary education
increases the probability of going abroad for work related reasons at some point in life.
Still, although most of the interviewees remain open to the idea of getting a job abroad, this
should not only be seen as a consequence of their foreign study experience, but also as a result
of being aware that their home country might not provide equally competitive opportunities.
These results are important for policymakers. Understanding the determinants of migration
in the search of a job in the case of the students with a “mobility capital” is essential to
formulating policies designed to attracting skilled individuals from abroad. At the same time,
this understanding is fundamental to help avoiding the “brain drain”, by keeping the skilled
youth on the autochthonous labor market.
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