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Academic staff can play a crucial role in encouraging students from underrepresented backgrounds to participate in international academic experiences like Erasmus+ exchanges, write Valérie Van Hees and Orhan Ağırdağ.
It will take more than policies alone to make international mobility in European higher education truly inclusive. Rather, it will become a reality when academics actively normalise students from all backgrounds studying abroad, explain its value and support them in accessing it. This is especially important because too many students still see study mobility as ‘not for people like me’, despite the transformative benefits such experiences can bring.
Academics can transform policy into real opportunities, making mobility accessible, inclusive and impactful for all students. When they integrate these messages into teaching – alongside structural supports, mentoring, additional funding and priority selection – mobility is reframed from an opportunity for a select few into a genuine pathway for all.
Internationalisation is a core pillar of European higher education. It is one of the most powerful instruments of the European Higher Education Area and the Bologna Process, reinforced through programmes such as Erasmus+.
As part of this, inclusive mobility has become central to policy, aligned with the social dimension agenda and broader commitments to equity and inclusion, yet another European priority. For example, the current Erasmus+ programme (2021–2027) introduced top-up grants, inclusion funds, shorter and blended mobility formats and institutional obligations to develop inclusion strategies.
While these measures reduce financial and logistical barriers, gaps in participation persist. Students from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds, first-generation students, students with disabilities and those from underrepresented regions continue to participate at lower rates. This is highly concerning, particularly as research indicates that international experiences have a strong impact on these students. Studying abroad enhances their academic confidence and language skills, broadens their professional and social networks, strengthens their long-term career prospects and deepens their sense of self and cultural identity.
These participation gaps are driven not only by financial or logistical barriers but also by perception. Many underrepresented students do not apply because they perceive mobility as financially challenging, academically demanding or socially unfamiliar. More fundamentally, they may not see themselves as legitimate candidates, reflecting deeper attitudinal barriers that shape aspirations and decision-making.
These misconceptions and self-exclusion patterns operate long before the application stage. Addressing them requires interventions right where academic identity and aspiration are formed: the classroom. Promoting mobility for disadvantaged students therefore requires early, repeated and targeted encouragement.
In the context of inclusion and equity, mobility is not a peripheral enrichment activity. It is a high-impact intervention that merits targeted support. And this is precisely why it is so important that academics actively translate their institution’s ambitions to make mobility more inclusive into classroom encouragement, guidance and representation.
Academics are powerful catalysts for equal student participation in mobility.
By sharing their own mobility experiences in the classroom and explicitly highlighting the value of international mobility, they help lower barriers and encourage students to seize unique learning and growth opportunities. Because academics are trusted voices in students’ academic lives, the way they speak about mobility strongly shapes how students perceive it. When these experiences are repeatedly integrated into classrooms, a multiplier effect emerges: more students see mobility as both attainable and worthwhile, and participation becomes normalised and academically meaningful.
The impact is particularly strong when academics from underrepresented backgrounds reflect on how international experiences shaped their careers. Representation expands students’ perception of who belongs in international spaces and helps counteract implicit exclusion.
Academics’ influence also extends to practical guidance that translates structural inclusion measures into tangible opportunities. This can include identifying capable students who may lack confidence, offering feedback on motivation letters, providing recommendation letters and individual support and advising on study planning.
But beyond the invaluable support that individual teachers can give to their students, how can this multiplier effect be boosted across the university?
Academic engagement is most effective when embedded in a student-centered mobility framework. Conceptualising mobility as a student journey – from awareness and consideration to application, departure, the mobility experience itself and eventually returning and becoming an ambassador – helps institutions identify points where students from underrepresented groups disengage and need support.
At the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at KU Leuven, we have developed a student journey with targeted communication touchpoints. This ensures that students are systematically informed about the value of international mobility at key moments such as information days and orientation events, as well as during classes, on social media and through testimonials from student ambassadors during their mobility and upon their return.
Additional video testimonials feature academics from disadvantaged backgrounds reflecting on how international experiences have shaped their academic paths. These resources are systematically integrated into faculty sessions, classrooms and KU Leuven’s institution-wide ‘Inclusive Mobility’ intranet portal, providing staff with practical tools to promote inclusive mobility. Together, this student journey and communication strategy have helped to achieve a 75% increase in Erasmus+ applications within our faculty.
This approach succeeds because it is embedded within a strong KU Leuven institutional policy supported by structural measures that promote inclusive mobility, also reflecting national and European goals.
KU Leuven’s international policy plan emphasises ‘inclusive and sustainable internationalisation’. Here, inclusive mobility is regarded as a key lever for fair and equitable internationalisation, providing accessible international learning experiences for all students – regardless of financial circumstances, caring responsibilities, disability or background.
At the institutional level, students from underrepresented groups are systematically prioritised in global mobility grant selection and supported with additional funding. Institutional budgets also facilitate participation in credit-bearing summer and winter schools, with extra top-ups for financially vulnerable students. Research shows short-term mobility is particularly effective for these students and often serves as a stepping stone to longer-term mobility.
KU Leuven’s Working Group on Inclusive Mobility plays a central role in achieving the university’s strategic goals. The group shares good practices, engages and inspires colleagues, provides policy advice, develops support materials and organises professional development activities such as workshops, inspiration sessions, peer learning, and debates.
The Working Group also developed the ‘Inclusive Mobility Platform’ intranet. This platform explains inclusive mobility policies, showcases faculty-level good practices, and provides communication recommendations, materials and testimonials that faculties can use to actively promote inclusive mobility. The message is clear: mobility is for all students.
When combined with the student journey and targeted faculty and institutional engagement, this approach demonstrates how policy, pedagogy and inclusive communication can work together to expand access to international learning. When academics across Europe adopt and integrate this approach into their classrooms, the true multiplier effect of inclusive mobility will make international learning systematically attainable and transformative for all students.
