Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
The 3 International Higher Education Studies Conference, Kayseri, Türkiye, 11 - 13 Ekim 2018, ss.148
ABSTRACT
After the Helsinki Summit (1999) by gaining the status of “candidate country
destined to join the EU,” Turkey became a participating country in the ERASMUS
programme in 2004. Since then, more than 120 thousands higher education students
from Turkey have benefited from the. Although this number is relatively low in
comparison to other European countries, this exchange schema gains a particular
significance in the case of Turkey as being nearly the only opportunity for
undergraduate students to study abroad. Due to the visa regulations and also financial
limitations, the large majority of participating students would not have been able to
have this international experience without the ERASMUS. Turkey’s longstanding
and complicated relationship with the “West” intensifies this particular significance.
From the late Ottoman modernization to the guest-worker migration started in the
1960, “going abroad (to study/work),” usually connotes “to Europe,” gains a specific
social meaning almost like a rite of passage.
In the lights of this historical and socio-political background, this study aims
to understand how the applicants in Turkey make their decisions to apply for this
exchange schema, what are their expectations and how they narrate this decision
before participating. We conducted our research in the case of Middle East Technical
University (METU) which is a leading university in the field of international
exchanges since the ERASMUS started as a pilot scheme in 2003. For instance, the
number of applicants steadily increased from 37 in 2004 to 576 in 2016. Moreover,
METU is also one of the principal universities in terms of academic quality and using
English as the language of instruction. In this sense, we assume that students at
METU are more open and willing to have international experience. Within this
framework, a comprehensive online surveyed applied to 700 applicants from the
cohort of 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 academic years at METU. We also conducted
individual interviews and organized focus group discussions to enrich our data.