International mobility flows and COVID-19 effects: evidence from Instituto Politécnico de Bragança

Facing the difficulties and the new challenges that COVID-19 has created for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), the future needs to analyse and reflect on this crisis. Considering the increasing value of international mobility in Portuguese HEIs in the last decades, this research aims to study the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the flow of student and faculty mobility. Since international students, as well as teaching staff mobility, are an asset for many HEIs, this study will be applied to the Instituto Politécnico de Bragança (IPB), an institution located in the interior of Portugal where the weight of international students is quite significant. The paper provides an overview of the mobility flows between the period 2004/2005 and the 2020/2021 academic year. According to the findings obtained, the restrictions on international physical mobility are observed as the biggest challenges that occurred in IPB during the COVID-19. From the results presented, a sharp growth in international mobility flows is evident until the 2018/2019 academic year, as a consequence of the investment made by the IPB’s presidency, in which one of the pillars of the institution’s growth is based on the internationalisation strategy. Afterwards, in the last two academic years, there has been a sharp decline; both in terms of student mobility, on average, there was a decrease of around 26.0%, and faculty mobility, on average, there was a decrease of approximately 55%.