Abstract
There has been both strong growth in the numbers of students studying abroad, and in the ‘talent wars’ (Clegg, 2007) amongst advanced economies seeking to attract and retain the highly skilled (Kuptsch, 2006). This has been matched by significant shifts in international student migration, with the initial dominant flows from developing and/or transition economies to developed ones (Docquier et al., 2007; Lowell & Findlay, 2001), being complemented by increasing awareness of more complex flows between origins and destinations (e.g. Ono & Piper, 2004; Findlay et al., 2006; Waters, 2006; Bhandari & Blumenthal, 2013; Lasanowski, 2011). There has also been, at least with respect to intra-European mobility (Van Bouwel & Veugelers, 2013), a broadening of the theoretical perspectives on international student migration with greater focus on circulation and knowledge transfer (Williams & Baláž, 2014a), identities (King & Ruiz-Gelices, 2003), transnationalism (Kobayashi & Preston, 2007), and employability (Teichler & Janson, 2007). There has also been increasing emphasis on utilising primary individual-level data, both quantitative and qualitative (Van Mol & Timmerman, 2014; King & Ruiz-Gelices, 2003). Despite the expanding research literature in this field, there are still significant gaps. This paper makes two main contributions. First, it analyses changes in the spatial distribution of intra-European student migration stocks in the period 1998-2012, focussing on shifts across three sub-periods in the parallel processes of concentration in poles of attraction, and regionalization, at a time of major institutional shifts such as EU enlargement and the introduction of the ERASMUS programme (Teichler et al., 2011). Network analysis brings a fresh perspective to this spatial analysis.