Student Mobility After COVID: A Three-Year Recovery Analysis

In 2020, European student mobility did not slow down. It stopped. Erasmus+ exchanges, traineeships, and study placements that had been building for two decades collapsed within a few months, and the honest question for any Erasmus+ coordinator, government mobility office, or university international relations team since has been simple: has it actually come back, and if so, in what shape.

This article answers that question with year-by-year data rather than impression. It draws on European Commission Erasmus+ annual reports (2019 through 2024), a 2025 peer-reviewed dataset built directly from Erasmus+ Mobility Tool records, and national agency figures from the Netherlands and Germany, to trace the collapse, the trough, and the recovery curve in as much precision as the published data currently allows. Where the data runs out, this piece says so, rather than estimating forward.

The Collapse: How Fast, and How Far

The scale of the 2020 disruption is easy to state in general terms and harder to pin down precisely, because different data sources measure different things: some count every Erasmus+ action across education, training, youth and sport, others count higher education students specifically, and others restrict the count to exchanges above a minimum duration. Reading across sources with that distinction in mind produces a consistent story, even where the exact percentages differ.

At the programme-wide level, the European Commission's own reporting shows Erasmus+ supporting more than 940,000 learning experiences abroad in 2019, across all sectors. In 2020, that figure fell to almost 640,000, a drop of roughly a third in headline terms. But that aggregate number blends short trips, youth exchanges, and staff mobility with student placements, and it does not capture how much more severe the collapse was for the specific cohort of higher education students undertaking a traditional-length exchange or traineeship.

For that more precise picture, the clearest available source is a 2025 dataset built directly from Erasmus+ Mobility Tool participant records by researchers Tuomas Vaisanen, Milad Malekzadeh, Oula Inkeroinen and Olle Jarv, published in the Nature-affiliated journal Scientific Data. Filtered to students aged 18 or older undertaking mobility of 90 days or longer, closer to what a coordinator would recognise as a standard semester exchange or full-length traineeship, the dataset shows EU higher education student mobility falling from 314,643 participants in 2019 to 165,263 in 2020, a drop of 47.4 percent. That is a materially steeper collapse than the programme-wide headline figure suggests, and it is the number that should anchor any planning conversation about long-duration mobility specifically.

The Shape of the Recovery, Year by Year

The table below sets out the same long-duration higher education student mobility series across the four years for which this level of detail is currently published. It is the most methodologically consistent EU-wide series available for this specific question, because it is built from a single dataset using the same duration and age filters in every year, rather than stitching together figures reported under different definitions across separate annual reports.

Source: Vaisanen, T., Malekzadeh, M., Inkeroinen, O. and Jarv, O., "Mobility of Erasmus+ students in Europe: Geolocated individual and aggregate mobility flows from 2014 to 2022," Scientific Data 12:489 (2025), filtered to participants aged 18+ undertaking mobility of 90 days or longer.

Read as a recovery curve, this is a steady, roughly linear climb rather than a sharp rebound: down 47 percent in the first year, back to 81 percent of baseline by the second, and to 90 percent by the third. Each year of the pandemic and its aftermath closed roughly a third of the remaining gap. If that pace held, and it is worth stressing this is an extrapolation from three data points rather than a published figure, EU higher education student mobility of this kind would have closed the remaining 10 percent gap to 2019 levels sometime around 2023, though no dataset at this level of precision has yet confirmed that.

That statement is accurate at the programme-wide level, and it is where the picture genuinely diverges depending on what is being counted. The table above is more conservative than the Commission's own framing because it isolates long-duration, higher education student mobility specifically, which is the segment most directly comparable to a semester exchange or full Erasmus+ traineeship. The aggregate figure the Commission cites folds in every Erasmus+ action across education, training, youth and sport, including the shorter and blended formats that expanded specifically because of the pandemic, a distinction covered in more depth below.

The Programme-Wide Totals, Through 2024

Extending the timeline beyond 2022 requires switching to the aggregate, programme-wide figures the European Commission publishes annually, since the more granular long-duration dataset above does not yet cover 2023 or 2024. Those aggregate totals tell an unambiguously positive headline story.

Two things are true at once here, and both matter for planning. First, the programme-wide total did not just recover, it grew well past its pre-pandemic level, reaching roughly 1.6 times the 2019 figure by 2024. Second, that growth is not the same thing as long-duration higher education student mobility fully closing its gap, which the more precise dataset above shows was still around 10 percent short as of 2022, the last year measured at that resolution. A university international office reading only the aggregate figure could reasonably, but incorrectly, conclude that student-level exchange and traineeship volumes are already back above 2019 levels across the board.

Why the Two Numbers Tell Different Stories: Blended Mobility

The gap between the aggregate recovery and the long-duration recovery has a specific structural cause. For the 2021-2027 programme generation, the European Commission formally introduced blended mobility: a short physical stay abroad, typically 5 to 30 days, for study or traineeship, combined with a compulsory virtual, online-learning component. It was built partly in direct response to the pandemic-era growth of virtual international education, and it gives students who cannot commit to a full semester abroad, or a multi-month placement, a lower-barrier way to participate.

Every blended mobility activity counts toward the Commission's aggregate participant totals in the tables above. None of them count toward the 90-plus day dataset used for the long-duration table, because they fall under the duration threshold by design. That is not a flaw in either dataset, it is a difference in what each one is measuring, but it means the programme-wide headline number recovering faster than the long-duration figure is at least partly a function of a new, shorter mobility category being added to the count, not solely a function of full-length exchanges and traineeships bouncing back to their old volumes.

For institutions, the practical implication is to ask which number a partner, a funder, or a ministry is quoting before treating "Erasmus+ mobility is back" as settled. If the claim rests on the aggregate participant count, it is accurate, but it may be describing a programme that now does more short, blended activity and has not yet fully restored its pre-pandemic volume of long, immersive placements, the format most consistently associated with the strongest employability outcomes discussed in our separate analysis of Erasmus+ impact data.

Study Mobility Versus Traineeship Mobility: What the National Data Shows

A genuinely honest answer to whether study mobility or traineeship (internship) mobility recovered faster EU-wide does not currently exist in a single, comparable dataset. Erasmus+ annual reports at EU level report total higher education mobility without a consistently published year-by-year study-versus-traineeship split, and the 2025 long-duration dataset used above does not distinguish mobility type either. Rather than estimate a figure that has not been published, this analysis reports what national agency data does show, with the caveat that a single country is not the whole EU.

The clearest national breakdown comes from the Netherlands. Nuffic, the Dutch Erasmus+ national agency, reports that Dutch Erasmus+ exchange participation collapsed from 13,656 students in 2019 to 3,658 in 2020, a fall of roughly 73 percent, sharper even than the EU-wide long-duration figure above. Within that reduced 2020 cohort, 1,997 students went abroad for a traineeship or internship, against 1,661 who went for study mobility. That is notable because study exchanges typically outnumber traineeships in a normal year. In the year of heaviest disruption, the balance briefly reversed.

A plausible, though not proven, explanation is timing flexibility. A semester study exchange is generally tied to a fixed academic calendar at a partner institution, which makes it harder to defer or reschedule around shifting travel restrictions. A traineeship can often be started later in the year, shortened, or matched to a host organisation with more flexible onboarding, which may have let more of them survive a year of rolling lockdowns and border rules. Germany's data points in a related direction at the degree-mobility level rather than the Erasmus+ level specifically: DAAD and DZHW's Wissenschaft weltoffen figures show 137,900 German students enrolled at universities abroad in 2019 and 138,800 in 2022, a full recovery and a slight surplus, though this measures full degree-mobile students rather than short-term Erasmus+ exchanges, and is not restricted to intra-EU movement, so it should be read as a directional data point rather than direct confirmation of the same pattern.

Structural Factors Shaping the Curve

Three factors, beyond the pandemic itself, help explain why the recovery has taken the shape it has, rather than a simple V-shaped bounce back to a single pre-pandemic trend line.

Blended and short-term formats. As set out above, the 2021-2027 programme generation deliberately built in shorter, lower-barrier mobility options. This is a genuine access improvement for students who could never previously justify a full semester abroad, but it also means aggregate totals and long-duration totals are no longer measuring quite the same underlying activity, which is worth remembering every time a "record year" headline appears in Erasmus+ communications.

Cost of living. Erasmus+ monthly grant amounts are set by destination country group and have historically ranged from roughly EUR 300 to EUR 700 per month. Those bands have not moved at the pace of the cost-of-living increases many host cities, particularly in the Netherlands, the Nordic countries, and parts of the DACH region, experienced from 2022 onward. National agencies and university international offices consistently flag affordability, not travel restrictions, as the more persistent post-pandemic barrier for students without family financial support, which is consistent with the Bologna Process's long-standing finding, discussed in more depth in our review of the Erasmus+ impact data, that mobility participation skews toward wealthier students even in a fully open, non-pandemic year.

Host country demand. Recovery has not been even across the continent. A small group of countries with well-established receiving infrastructure, bilateral agreements, and language accessibility continue to absorb a disproportionate share of both study and traineeship placements, while newer or smaller sending markets are rebuilding host relationships more slowly. The country-level detail behind this pattern, including which nations lead in absolute terms versus per capita, is covered in our separate ranking of EU countries by outbound internship mobility, which this article deliberately does not repeat, since its focus is the recovery trajectory over time rather than a current-year snapshot.

What This Means for Mobility Offices Planning Ahead

For a mobility office building a multi-year plan, three practical conclusions follow from the data above. First, treat "Erasmus+ mobility has recovered" as true at the programme-wide level and only partly confirmed at the long-duration, semester-or-traineeship level, since the most precise dataset available currently stops in 2022 at 90 percent of baseline. Second, expect that a growing share of any programme-wide total reflects blended and short-term formats rather than full-length placements, and plan staffing and host-organisation capacity accordingly rather than assuming every counted participant needs the same level of pastoral and documentation support as a full traineeship. Third, where affordability rather than availability is the binding constraint on full recovery, particularly for students without family financial support, a structured, verifiable placement record can reduce a student's own risk in committing to a placement, since it gives a host organisation confidence before the relationship begins. The Living Profile approach used across the Internship Abroad network was built around exactly that problem, giving a student's readiness a durable record that travels with them regardless of which funding stream, Erasmus+, an institutional grant, or self-funded, ultimately supports the placement.

Institutions building or refreshing an Erasmus+ traineeship pipeline can also draw on the free internship toolkit for practical documentation and onboarding resources that align with the funding mechanics discussed here.

Sources: Vaisanen, T., Malekzadeh, M., Inkeroinen, O. and Jarv, O., "Mobility of Erasmus+ students in Europe: Geolocated individual and aggregate mobility flows from 2014 to 2022," Scientific Data 12:489 (2025), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04789-0; European Commission, Erasmus+ Annual Reports 2019 to 2024 and associated press releases (including IP/23/6165, November 2023), erasmus-plus.ec.europa.eu; Nuffic, Erasmus+ higher education student mobility data (Netherlands), nuffic.nl; DAAD and DZHW, Wissenschaft weltoffen data on German students abroad, cited via DAAD press release, daad.de; Eurostat, Learning mobility statistics, ec.europa.eu/eurostat. Figures cited reflect official and peer-reviewed reporting available at the time of writing, July 2026. Where EU-wide data broken down by mobility type or covering 2023-2024 at the same level of detail as the 2019-2022 series was not found in published form, this article says so explicitly rather than estimating.