Spending time abroad during study. The influence of social background and ethnicity

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Theoretical and Empirical background

3. Hypotheses

4. Data,Variables and Method

5. Results
5.1 The influence of social background and ethnicity
5.2 Applying control variables

6. Conclusion

7. Appendix

8. References

1. Introduction

This paper deals with the topic of students 'abroad experience during study and aims at analysing how the study abroad decision gets influenced by social background and ethnicity.

The number of students that have spent time abroad during study has increased within the past years. In the year 2008 103.000 German students have studied at an university in a foreign country, this is an increase of 13% compared to the data from 2007. The increase is even higher when looking at the development between 2001 and 2008, during this period of time the data even show an increase of 93% (see Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung).

But there's still evidence that a gap remains between students with different social backgrounds in the likeliness to take part in exchange programs. Lörz (2011) talks about a rising student mobility within the groups of students ‘from academic and non-academic families between 1990 and 2005, but differences stayed. While the participation of students ‘from academic households enhanced from 5% on about 14%, the participation of those from non-academic households only increased from 3% onto 7%. (see Lörz & Krawietz p.199 f.)

My motivation to look closer at the theme time spend abroad is the constant confrontation with this topic during study. Universities encourage their students to participate in exchange programs and offer the impression that an exchange semester is an urgent part of study to get the most favourable jobs. Also I am interested in the topic of social inequality and its consequences. I would like to know if women and men do have equal chances to spend time abroad, if ethnicity is an influence factor, how the likeliness differs between students with various social backgrounds and if this influence varies between countries. I want to find out how many students participate in study abroad and if this opportunity is open for all those that want to take part.

Therefore I decided to analyse the research question how personal factors like ethnicity and social background influence the probability to spend time abroad during study.

In the following chapters I will provide some information on previous research concerning the topic of study abroad and it's linkage with social inequality. Afterwards I am going to introduce my research design and the hypotheses I plan to examine during my research and finally present the results of my Stata analyses in relation to the hypotheses and the research question I have set up before.

2. Theoretical and Empirical background

One article that supports my hypothesis that personal factors influence the likeliness of spending time abroad is the one by Simon & Ainsworth (2012) where they are dealing with the topic of Race and Socio economic Differences in the Study abroad participation. They state that poor and minority students do less participate in study abroad programs, because they fewer benefit from financial support, than students from high income families. They also have to depend on financial aid to finance their studies and do not have resources to financially effort an exchange semester. Ainsworth et al also mention that students' habitus is another important factor, because it gets influenced by one's ethnic and social background and shapes the attitude towards the study abroad experience. Furthermore are poor and minority students less likely to have family members or friends who have spent time abroad themselves and could be taken as role models. Their results provide evidence that students with families that have travelled a lot or have lived abroad some time, are more likely to participate in an exchange program.

According to Wiers-Jenssen (2011) mobile students are not just more likely to have parents with a degree of higher education, but also have a higher probability to have parents who have lived abroad for a while, or have previous abroad experience themselves. Also I take into account the 2008 published case study of Horn, Jerome & White were they analysed how family income level influences the probability to spend time abroad during study, because they came to the conclusion that students from higher income classes do more often spend time abroad, than students from lower income classes do.

In their 2011 published article Lörz and Krawitz (2011), deal with the topic of social origin as an influence factor on students ‘international mobility. They assume that students of non-academic households are less likely to participate in study abroad programs due to material and immaterial aspects. Students of lower class families have lower financial resources, do more often work during study and aim to finish their studies within a short period of time. Moreover do students from non-academic families have worse grades and language skills than students from tertiary educated families. But they also acknowledge that field of study has an influence and can partly explain the variations in the participation of exchange programs between those two groups. Students from human arts and language fields participate more often in study abroad programs, because it is an important part of their education, whereas exchange programs are of less meaning for students from engineering fields. Lörz et al. come to the conclusion that international mobility has enhanced within students from academic and non­academic families, but inequality between those two groups remained.

Heublein et al.(2008) provide support for the results of Lörz & Krawietz and append that student international mobility increases during study and reaches its peak of about 40 per cent at the begin of the ninth and tenth semester. Salisbury, Pascarella& Paulsen add in their 2010 published article about the gender gap in the intent to study abroad that more women plan to spend some time abroad. 67 per cent of all women, but only 57 per cent of all men in the sample planned to do so. They also identified that variables like race, socio economic status, parental education and the higher institution quality have different effects on men and women concerning the intend to study abroad. For instance do they annotate that women from lower income families are less likely to study abroad, whereas no such influence is found for the men.

3. Hypotheses

I have the hypothesis that students whose parents have a degree of higher education themselves do more often spend time abroad during study than those with parents that do not own a degree of higher education. This is due to the fact that parents with a degree of tertiary education are more likely to have higher earnings and can financially support their children. Also I suppose that they did more often spend time abroad themselves during their study and encourage their children to participate in study abroad programs. Furthermore I am considering that students whose parents or at lest one parent was bom abroad do more often intent to take part in an exchange program, because they are used to travel around and see it as something common. Also I assume that the influence of the independent variables ethnicity and social background differs across various countries, because there are different types ofhigher education and social class systems in each of the examined countries.

4. Data,Variables and Method

To analyse my research question I will use the REFLEX dataset which provides information of students from 13 different countries who graduated in the academic year 1999/2000. I won't use the entire data set, but only a sample that includes graduates from Germany, Norway and Britain.

I choose Great Britain, because I expect that the effect of social background is bigger in Britain than in Germany and Norway. This is due to the fact that the British higher education system is very selective and students have to pay very high study fees, whereas there are no, respectively only low fees in Germany and Norway. Therefore I assume that only British students with parents of higher social classes can afford to spend time abroad, whereas in Norway and Germany it should be possible for students of all social classes, especially because there are various programs that offer financial support for students that intent to spend time abroad during study. Also I assume that social background is of minor importance in Norway, because they have a high amount of graduates from tertiary education, what indicates that students from lower social classes should have better chances to go to university. Therefore I think that there is also a lower influence of social background on the probability to spend time abroad in Norway.

As dependent variable I have generated the variable timeabroad, which includes all students that have spent some time abroad for work or study during study and as independent variables I am considering ethnicity and social background. Due to the fact that the data set does not include a social background variable, I will take the parents highest education as an indicator and therefore generated the variable eduparents. Furthermore I have generated the variable ethnicity which indicates if students have parents or at least one parent that was born abroad. In a second model I want to add the control variables gender, field of study and age in groups, to look, how they alter the influence of ethnicity and eduparents on the dependent variable timeabroad, therefore I created dummy­variables. Because there were so many different ages I have generated the variable agegroups, which divides the students into five groups. The first age group, agel, consists of all students between 25 and 27, age2 consists of students between 29 and 30, age3 of those between 31 and 33, age4 of those between 34 and 36 and age5 of all that are 37 years or older. I only want to use the first four age groups because most of the students of the sample are younger than 37 years (82.44%).

By running some descriptive STATA analyses one can see that 20.4 per cent of all graduates in Germany, Britain and Norway have spent some time abroad during study for study or work related reasons. 27.35 per cent of all students in the sample have parents that old a degree of higher education themselves and 9.4 per cent have at least one parent that was bom in a foreign country. Doing the same analyses for each country separately one can see that the results differ across the countries. In Germany 28.57 percent of the students in the sample have studied some time abroad, in Norway only 17.83 percent did so and the UK has the lowest study abroad participation with only 15.34 percent. In Germany 31.41 percent of the students in the sample have parents with tertiary education, whereas this is only the case for 26.10 percent of the Norwegian and 24.67 percent of the British students. Concerning ethnicity the UK has the highest amount of students with parents born abroad. 15.02 percent have parents or at least one parent that was born in a foreign country, while with only 8.29 respectively 6.22 percent the amount is much lower in Germany and Norway.

5. Results

5.1 The influence of social background and ethnicity

First I applied a model which examines the influence of the independent variables ethnicity and social background on the probability to spend time abroad.

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