Five years after graduation, the unemployment rate of participants with international experience is reported to be 23% lower than that of non-mobile students. The problem lies in this “those who”: in several Southern European countries, notably Greece, Portugal, and Spain, participants more often declare having a parent with a higher education degree, but Italy constitutes a clear exception; and participation rates vary considerably between rural regions and developed urban areas. Studies document favorable associations between international mobility and professional trajectories, but its distribution remains unequal across regions and socio-economic profiles.
The Essentials
- The study reports an unemployment rate 23% lower five years after graduation, a gain that ranks among the most significant documented in European higher education.
- Participation rates vary by region.
- Unequal access is partly explained by indirect costs and differences in mobility support across institutions.
- Access reform is achievable through socio-economic quotas or expanded funding for indirect costs, but few member states have formally institutionalized these measures.
- The 2030 challenge: whether Europe chooses to expand this lever or allow it to amplify the trajectory gaps it claims to reduce.
The Employment Gain: What It Measures and Its Limits
Studies document an association with an unemployment rate 23% lower, accompanied by positive associations with future occupational mobility and, in some contexts, earnings, without uniformly demonstrating a direct causal effect on initial employability and compensation. Intercultural skills, command of a second working language, the network built during the stay—all of this translates into concrete advantage on the labor market.
But this aggregate figure masks a striking geographical dispersion. In Germany, a significant share of alumni find employment in another EU country in the years following their return. In Poland, some former participants return to low-wage employment in their region of origin. The explanation lies partly in the structure of the local labor market, but also in who leaves. A German student from an affluent family who spends six months in Madrid returns with a network, a language, and confidence.
A rural Polish student who could have made the same journey never left.
The observed gaps after mobility do not alone measure the causal effect of Erasmus+ on those who access it. They also tell us nothing about what it fails to do for those it structurally excludes.
The Capture Mechanism: Costs the Grant Does Not Cover
The Erasmus+ grant contributes to travel and living expenses, while tuition and registration fees at the host institution are in principle waived; it does not explicitly provide compensation for foregone salary income.
For a family with modest income, spending a semester abroad often means giving up part-time employment that finances their studies. The grant compensates for the cost-of-living differential, not that foregone income. The program creates different access barriers depending on families’ ability to finance the indirect costs of mobility.
This mechanism creates a de facto capture: places benefit disproportionately to candidates whose families can finance the indirect costs of mobility. The filter is invisible, but it is systematic.
This dynamic is not unique to Erasmus+. It reproduces what we observe in other mobility and advanced training programs across Europe: public resources dedicated to higher education primarily benefit those who already have the means to access it, and the most effective programs often only amplify already favorable trajectories.
Institutionalized Ambition and Its Blind Spots
Rutger Bregman, in his work on mobilizing talent toward major collective challenges, illustrates a tension that the Erasmus+ case makes concrete: institutionalizing moral ambition without reproducing existing hierarchies. His “School for Moral Ambition,” which brings together more than 10,000 members across a hundred countries, starts from the observation that the most capable minds are too often directed toward lucrative careers rather than collective ends. The goal is to redirect vocations without the institution charged with doing so becoming itself a class filter.
Erasmus+ is exactly this real-world test. The program is a success of institutional engineering: thirty-five years of existence, millions of participants, favorable associations with employment, a measurable contribution to building a shared European identity. Access inequalities persist despite the program’s inclusion objective, but their causal reproduction by Erasmus+ at the general scale is not established. Erasmus+ remains confronted with access obstacles, but it also funds inclusion measures and welcomes participants with fewer opportunities.
The competing reading is that of Philippe Aghion, whose work on Schumpeterian growth emphasizes the importance of educational institutions for generating innovation. Aghion would show that the collective gain of Erasmus+ exceeds the individual gain: alumni form transnational networks that accelerate the diffusion of ideas, stimulate researcher mobility, and contribute to the competitiveness of the European economy as a whole. In this reading, the program is first an investment in European human capital, and its overall efficiency justifies its existence regardless of its distribution.
These two readings coexist without canceling each other out. The first concerns the program’s effectiveness for its direct beneficiaries; the data show it delivers on its promises. The second concerns its actual reach relative to its stated objectives.
Not yet, if the stated objective includes European social cohesion.
Rural Poland Against Germany: Two Programs in One
Curriculum structures and mobility management contribute to participation gaps, but it is not established that they predominate independently of talent and motivation. German higher education institutions have well-staffed mobility services, long-standing university partnerships, and dedicated teams for preparing Erasmus+ applications. In a Polish provincial university, this support often does not exist, or is limited to an annual email reminding students that the program is open.
Preparation for mobility is itself unequally distributed. Knowing how to apply, which partner institutions offer the best conditions, how to negotiate credit recognition upon return—all of this is learned, and it is learned better in institutions accustomed to sending students abroad. Institutions accustomed to doing so are, unsurprisingly, those whose students leave the most.
Erasmus+ participation rates vary according to institutional characteristics.
The Requirements of an Access Reform and the Reasons for Its Delay
Reform avenues are well-known and include socio-economic quotas or expanded funding for indirect costs, which could alter distribution. Expanding financing to indirect costs is regularly proposed as a means to reduce access barriers for low-income families.
Creating mobility preparation offices in rural areas with low participation is more complex to finance but technically straightforward: mobility advisors attached to existing secondary schools and technical colleges, who begin working with students before they enter higher education, before the application gap widens.
These reforms are slow in coming because they force member states to politicize a decision currently treated as technical. Instituting socio-economic quotas in a university program opens the debate on selection, meritocracy, and the meaning of equal opportunity in higher education. This debate is politically costly, particularly in countries where participants with favorable profiles wield significant electoral weight through their families.
Expanding funding for indirect costs is simpler to defend politically, but it runs up against the budget question. In a context where public debt compresses fiscal space for investment spending in several member states, increasing the Erasmus+ budget to cover expanded indirect costs requires a trade-off that few governments have made.
Two Trajectories for 2030: Lever or Mirror of Inequalities
The 2030 horizon opens two distinct scenarios, which current data allow us to identify warning signals for.
In the first, the European Commission conditions part of the Erasmus+ envelope on participation results of partner institutions by family income decile. Member states that display participation gaps exceeding a defined threshold lose a fraction of their allocation or must finance corrective measures. This mechanism, comparable to performance conditions applied to structural funds, already exists in other European programs. Applied to Erasmus+, it would create institutional pressure on establishments to develop preparation offices and finance indirect costs. The gap between rural and urban areas would gradually narrow, and the documented employment gain would become a lever for expanded social mobility, reaching profiles that need it most.
In the second, access reforms are slow to become institutionalized before the next multiannual financial framework. The program continues to grow in volume—more students, more partner countries—but the program’s composition evolves slowly regarding participants with fewer opportunities. Access inequalities by socio-economic profile persist in certain regions. Better-resourced institutions tend to develop more comprehensive mobility services, while others fall behind, widening participation gaps. Erasmus+ continues to document favorable associations with employment, but participation gaps by geographical and social origin could amplify professional trajectory inequalities, contrary to its stated cohesion objective.
The signals that will allow us to distinguish between the two trajectories are readable right now: the evolution of participation rates by family income decile in countries with documented low participation, and the gap in post-Erasmus+ employment rates between alumni from rural and urban areas measured three years after mobility. If these data begin to converge before 2027, it means reforms are producing an effect. If the gap remains stable or widens, the program has entrenched itself in its elitist trajectory.
Data from Nature on intergenerational mobility in Europe raise a precise question: can a public instrument be simultaneously effective for its beneficiaries and structurally unequal in its access without contradicting its own objectives? The answer is affirmative in the short term. Over the longer term, a program supposed to strengthen European cohesion cannot ignore inequalities in its access without risking compromising its political legitimacy.
Sources
- Nature, “Intergenerational Mobility Fosters Innovation in Europe,” EurekAlert, 2026
- European Commission, Education & Training Monitor 2025 (annual report, direct link not guaranteed)
- Cedefop, 2025 report on mobility and skills in Europe (direct link not guaranteed)
