Until the corona pandemic, it was a matter of course for students to “migrate”.
They changed their place of study in their own country, completed Erasmus semesters and completed degrees abroad.
Some pursued their further careers there and integrated themselves into the labor market and scientific system of their new homeland.
All of this should be possible again soon.
Hardly any other area of world society was and remains more mobile than university education and science.
Scholars have always been on the go.
But when did student mobility become a mass phenomenon?
Isabella Löhr draws attention to the four decades before the First World War.
In an era of economic growth and new transport and communication technologies, the number of emigrants increased dramatically.
Western Europeans flocked to North America and Russia, Indians to the British Caribbean, Chinese to Northeast Asia and the American West Coast.
This new migration landscape also included students.
Their targets were not factories, farms or plantations, but universities.
Unlike artisans, maids, or agricultural "coolies," they did not set out in the hundreds of thousands or even millions.
When it comes to elite migration, “mass phenomenon” can only mean that an academic stay abroad has become an attractive and viable option for the first time.
In an era in which only a few people spent a part of their lives at universities, those studying abroad formed a minority within the minority of the educated and those seeking education.
In contrast to the young nobles, who in the eighteenth century embarked on an individually designed grand tour with their court masters, the mobile students - mostly men - around 1900 were not free roaming educational tourists.
They benefited from new enabling structures.
Governments in independent countries, as well as in some colonies, pursued a policy of external training for young people.
Talented young people were sent to the scientific centers of Europe and North America, and around the turn of the century also from China to Japan.
After a few years, they were expected to be useful as “returned students” in their home countries, preferably in government service.
Conversely, prospective students were recruited.
The Christian mission saw this as a promising new strategy: While missionaries continued to be sent to the realms of “paganism”, there was a good deal to be said for bringing potential converts to Christian countries and winning them over to the faith there.
This was made easier when Christian - this book is about Protestant - reception organizations looked after the arrivals.