Introduction

3That this should be the case provides us with a justification for choice of research subjects: tertiary educated young people, specifically those currently studying at various universities in the city of Lisbon. In regard to a main research question, the issue which concerns us is future plans for geographic mobility. What we wish to ascertain is the extent to which these students are contemplating a move abroad after the completion of their present course of study, taking into account the bearing of factors associated with the economic crisis: or put in simple terms, is the crisis driving qualified young people away from Portugal? In respect to the impact of the crisis, this includes not only economic impacts, such as fears regarding future employment prospects or dwindling hopes of attaining financial independence, but also more personal considerations such as the likelihood of having a family of one’s own. These are all key issues in mobility decision-making which will be considered in the discussion of results which follows.

4At the same time, and putting this discussion into a broader theoretical context, the opportunity will also be taken in this article to inform current debates on what has come to be known as “international student mobility” (King, Findlay and Ahrens, 2010), with particular emphasis upon understanding the relationship between the crisis and prospective mobility after the completion of an initial degree course. With existing perspectives within this research field concentrating on modalities strongly associated with mobility as practiced in Anglophone and core European nations, we wish to learn of the desired forms of outward movement among student respondents, including considerations such as reasons for wanting to leave, preferred destinations and anticipated durations of stays abroad.

 Theoretical context: international student mobility (in crisis)

5Widespread unemployment among the highly qualified has a double significance for a national economy. There is obviously a price to be paid by the state, and families, in regard to providing welfare to jobless graduates, on top of the long-term unemployed, added to which is lost revenue due to an inability to utilise their accrued “academic capital” (Bourdieu, 1984). Moving away from political economy and towards a more personal and subjective level of analysis, we also need to take into account the disruption to the life courses of many graduates, whose skills risk being laid to waste alongside their future prospects for becoming independent adults (Nico, 2014). But another form of “disruption” relates to the threat posed to the geographical integrity of transitions to adult due what migration scholars term a heightened “mobility requirement” (Morano-Foadi, 2005: 146), meaning voluntary or involuntary movement abroad for work or study purposes for many of those who wish to fulfil their professional ambitions.

6This idea of utilising spatial movement to circumnavigate regional disadvantage is not a new theme within Sociology. It has previously been discussed by the author in a range of studies (Cairns, 2008, 2010, 2014a), and many other researchers in the fields of human migration and youth studies. In regard to the Portuguese context of this discussion, a considerable debt is also owed to pre-existing work on youth traditions within Portugal (see, for example, Pais, 2001; Guerreiro and Abrantes, 2004; Pappámikail, 2004; Guerreiro, Torres and Lobo, 2009; Dellgran et al., 2012; Torres, Coelho and Cabrita, 2013). This work provides insight into the personal and professional dilemmas facing highly qualified youth, before and after the crisis, including the reflection that many Portuguese young people engage in prolonged periods of inter-dependent living with their families, meaning a greater propensity towards completing undergraduate studies close to home (Biggart and Cairns, 2004; Biggart et al., 2010; Cairns, 2011). What remains to be considered is the impact of the economic crisis on the education and work transitions of tertiary educated youth; those who may be at risk of unemployment and social disadvantage, taking into account mobility choices.

 Methodological approach

10All respondents were undergraduates, with ten different academic fields of study included in the final sample: Business and Administration; Health; Engineering; Social and Behavioural Sciences; Architecture; Arts; Education; Law; Humanities; and Life Sciences. In respect to the choice of these fields, government statistics divide the Portuguese student population into 22 academic subject groups. Ten of the largest groups were included in the final sample, with the remainder not covered due to the very small sizes of these groups. That the eliminated subject categories still comprised 17.65% of the overall student population, or 65,502 students, should be considered, but we can say that the actual sample was representative of slightly more than 82% of the Portuguese student population (INE, 2013: 145-146). Data collection was undertaken by the author, with the assistance of teaching and support staff at the various university faculties, with questionnaires personally administered to respondents, none of whom refused to participate in the study. While labour intensive, this approach ensured that sample parameters were accurately adhered to, in addition to providing an opportunity to confirm that respondents were appropriately informed as to the aims and objectives of the study. A total of 400 cases were included in the final sample, gender-balanced (50% male and 50% female) and proportionately structured in relation to the ten fields of study.

11In respect to the demographic make-up of this sample, it was important to ensure that students from different socio-economic backgrounds were included. As none of the respondents were in full-time employment, “social class” was estimated from the proxy indicator of parental occupational background. This revealed that 18% of the sample had parents in managerial and professional occupations, with 59% in skilled manual and non-manual occupations and an additional 23% in semi-skilled and unskilled occupations; this last group also included students with economically inactive parents, such as those who were presently unemployed or deceased. Regarding other sample characteristics, two of the respondents were married and eight cohabiting with a partner (4% of the sample), and only one had children. 12% had experience of living in different countries, mostly Portuguese-speaking African countries (Cape Verde, Angola and Mozambique) or other European countries; 80% lived in the parental home, with 12% residing with friends and 6% living alone.

 Exploring mobility decision-making

12In order to answer the basic question of how popular the idea of moving abroad is among respondents, discussion of results begins with an overview of their mobility intentions. The “should I stay or should I go” decision is a mainstay of migration and mobility research, and not only in studies conducted with students (see, for example, Fischer, Martin and Straubhaar, 1997; Hammar and Tamas, 1997), although the nature of the question differs from study to study. But in the present research context, the focus was upon intentions to leave Portugal after completion of present course of study irrespective of duration, although anticipated length of stays was included in a supplementary question, along with inquiry into motivations and probable destinations.

14 In regard to the gender disparity, it has been argued elsewhere that young women are facing more privation than young men during the crisis period (McDowell, 2012). It may therefore be the case that a greater degree of labour market marginalisation at this time is prompting a greater number of prospective exits, although youth unemployment rates in Portugal do not currently show a significant gender disparity. We should however acknowledge that this disadvantage may also reflect a more long-standing problem in regard to transitions to the labour market among tertiary educated young women. For example, it is known that even prior to the crisis, female graduates took longer to find a job than their male counterparts in Portugal (Gonçalves, 2010).

15What the outcomes presented in figure 1 confirm with less ambiguity is that a desire to move abroad for the next educational or occupational step has been registered in a substantial number of cases, if still a minority, although we obviously do not know at this point in time precisely how many of these students will actual depart as this question is outside the scope of this analysis. But while acknowledging the fact that these are intentions rather than concrete plans, if these plans were to be enacted in the form of actual exits, and generalised to the tertiary educated population of Portugal, this would represent an exodus that could contribute to a cycle of underdevelopment, such as has been observed in other southern European contexts such as Greece (Labrianidis and Vogiatzis, 2013).

16It is also worth bearing in mind the different reasons these respondents have for wanting to leave Portugal: for example, are they intending to continue their tertiary education level trajectories or do they wish to enter the labour market in their anticipated destination?

17Figure 2 confirms that what these young people are seeking is work, with 50% of all those indicating a desire to leave Portugal stating that their intention was to enter a foreign labour market. Also notable is the fact that 20% are seeking postgraduate study opportunities, and that 17% “don’t know” what their reason for seeking an exit is. The remaining 13% stated that they had “other” reasons for wanting to leave, the most popular being mobility for leisure purposes. But these outcomes are an interesting contrast with the idea implicit in European policy discourse of student mobility as a practice orientated towards enhancing the skills base of the “home” country, with half of these young people seeking work and a significant number of others wanting to continue their education elsewhere.

18 A related issue is that of probable destinations for those with mobility intentions. In the past, the parents and grandparents of at least some of these respondents have gravitated towards migrating to other European countries, including France, Germany, Luxembourg and Switzerland, or other Lusophone societies such as Brazil (Baganha and Góis, 1999); and recent data shows that France, Brazil and the USA are still the most popular places for adult Portuguese migrants (Pires et al., 2011). Considering the specificities of student mobility in contrast to other forms of population circulation, including the need to invest academic capital, we might expect to encounter a different range of destinations among our prospective student “migrants,” for example, a preference for countries which offer the best opportunities for post-graduate study.

19To explore this issue, a block of questions was included in the survey enquiring as to the popularity of various types of destination for those registering an intention to leave. This included other Lusophone countries and alternative options such as moving to neighbouring or English language speaking countries, with the freedom to select more than one scenario.

20Figure 3 provides an overview of responses: most popular are the ideas of moving to a “country not affected by the economic crisis” (88%), an “English-language speaking country” (87%) and “Another European country” (86%). The idea of moving to “another Lusophone country” is least attractive, with only 40% of potential leavers selecting this option, while 60% would move to a country in which friends live, and 43%, other family members. Broadly speaking, these results indicate a break with the traditional pattern of Portuguese migration among this group of students, although we should bear in mind that we are considering a diverse range of mobility modalities as opposed to having a singular focus on a more or less permanent exits. Alternatively, it may be that this is a more student specific mobility pattern, leaning towards Anglophone and core European destinations; a position generally supported by prior work on graduate mobility in Portugal (Araújo 2007; Fontes 2007; Delicado 2011).

21 Moving on to consider the related issue of anticipated durations of stays abroad among the 35% of respondents who registered an intention to leave, survey results provide an indication of how long these young people wish to spend abroad.

23If short-term movement is not what these students desire, the question remains regarding the popularity of longer duration alternatives, including modalities corresponding to migratory norms. Returning to figure 4, we can see that 4% of potentially mobile respondents indicated that they intend to stay abroad for a period of up to 5 years, 10% for between 5 and 10 years, and 6% for longer. While this does imply that a combined 20% could be making relatively substantial stays outside of Portugal, the outstanding result is that 80% were undecided about how long to stay away. In interpreting this outcome, what immediately springs to mind are contemporaneous studies in Portugal that have examined the general state of the youth generation: characterised by an inability to plan for the future due to a loss of hope during the crisis (Alves et al., 2011). It may therefore be the case that this loss of planning capability extends to the question of international mobility.

 Mobility and crisis?

24The second part of this analysis considers a range of subjective impacts of the economic crisis upon the lives of the student respondents, assessing the bearing of these impacts upon the decision to leave Portugal using a straightforward binary logistic regression model. Five crisis impacts were included in the model presented in table 1: a perceived diminution of the value of one’s educational credentials; decreased possibility of finding a job in the local labour market; reduced capacity to be financially independent of one’s family (i.e. parents); decreased likelihood of having a family of one’s own; and sense of personal well-being eroded. These issues are mainstays of youth sociology (see, for example, Shanahan, 2000), including the study of transitions to adulthood in Portugal (see, for example, Nico, 2014), where there is a need to appreciate the interaction between macro-structural level factors such as a change in labour market conditions alongside micro level issues such as young people’s own needs and desires. However, to date there has been relatively little exploration of the impact of the crisis at a subjective level through the use of primary data in Portugal. For the purposes of the model presented in table 1, the decision to leave Portugal was coded “1", with the intention to stay ”0". The robustness of the model was: chi square 22.748, sig 0.000 and Nagelkerke R square 0.119, with 59.6% of cases classified correctly. Overall, it can be said that the model is highly significant in terms of predicting a decision to leave Portugal: l to a 0.00 level of significance according to the Pearson chi square statistic. This implies that there is a strong association between the impact the crisis is making, as measured by the combination of the five items included in the model, and wanting to leave Portugal on completion of present course of study.

25 From table 1 we can also obtain an idea as to what matters most in terms of the bearing the crisis upon the mobility decision in respect to these five indicators. The results show that it is “sense of well-being negatively affected” that matters most; in fact, out of the five dimensions, it is the only response that proved to be statistically significant in its own right in predicting a decision to leave.

26That a personal as opposed to a strictly professional factor should be found to be of paramount importance is an interesting finding. This outcome is consistent with emerging evidence from non-traditional sites of research on student mobility, namely an experimental study conducted by Baláž et al. (2014) in Slovakia, which demonstrated that student mobility decision-making involves more than simple cost-benefit calculations. However while this Slovakian study emphasised the importance of non-monetary resources such as access to information, in the present context it was very different factor which acted as the greatest push towards leaving: the more psychological issue of well-being. In this sense, it is possible to argue that there needs to be greater consideration of factors such as personal happiness in our understanding of student mobility decision-making alongside the more obvious issue of career development.

 Conclusion: post-diploma mobility in and out of crisis

27In reaching a conclusion, the results presented in the preceding discussion strongly suggest that mobility, in this case movement abroad after the completion of an undergraduate degree, matters to a substantial number of the student respondents included in this study. The fact that this was, for the most part, a representative study means that we have some grounds for believing that this orientation may have some applicability to greater numbers of students within this educational cohort. We can also observe that half of those with plans to leave are seeking work and the destinations sought by this tertiary educated youth cohort diverge somewhat from the countries that have attracted most “adult” Portuguese migrants in the past, veering more closely towards popular choices for students across Europe. However, these remarks are tempered by the high degree of uncertainty in regard to anticipated lengths of stays abroad, indicating that the sojourns to be undertaken may be open-ended or that plans have yet to be finalised. What we learn about the impact of the economic crisis is that, as we might have expected, there is a link between the weight of a combination of factors associated with the transition to adulthood, and among these dimensions, it is a personal consideration which matters most, namely the negative impact of the crisis upon well-being.

28This evidence also supports the case for including mobility upon completion of an undergraduate degree into European student mobility paradigms: this modality obviously matters to a large number of students in the present context, and the same may be the case of other economic crisis contexts or societies with few opportunities for the highly qualified. For these reasons, I would argue that what I have termed “post-diploma mobility” (Cairns, 2014a, 2014b) should be integrated into existing schemata of “international student mobility”, alongside the already recognised categories of “credit mobility” and “diploma/degree mobility”. In regard to substance, we have gained some insight into what “post-diploma mobility” entails. Like “degree” or “diploma mobility” (see, for example, Altbach and Knight, 2007; Marginson, 2008; Dale and Robertson, 2009), this is a practice which refers to laissez faire movement abroad for work or study. But the suggestion from the present context is that it may be a longer duration or more opened-ended form of movement, adhering more to the norms of classical migration than “international student mobility” as conceptualised in other European nations (see, for example, King and Raghuram, 2013). It was also noted that there was significantly more interest in moving at this level from female as opposed to male respondents, opening up possibilities for future analysis of the gender dimension of this modality.