Exploring the effects of mobility and foreign nationality on internal career progression in universities

Abstract

This article explores how organizational mobility and foreign nationality affect a researcher’s chances of an internal career promotion in university systems that do not have rules preventing inbreeding and where teaching occurs mostly not in English but a local language. As a case study, we have examined the Flemish university system, the Dutch speaking part of Belgium, and developed expectations on the chances of promotion for mobile and foreign researchers compared to non-mobile and nationals. We use data for all postdoctoral and professorial staff between 1991 and 2017, for a total of 14,135 scientists. We calculated the chances of promotion with a competing risk model to take time into account and to disentangle the probability of two mutually exclusive risk events: promotion and leaving the university. The results show that international mobility and foreign nationality reduced the chances of promotion in the same university, and that mobile and foreign scientists were also more likely to leave any given university. These effects were particularly strong at an early stage: in the study period, 21.9% of non-mobile national postdocs became professor compared to just 1.2% of internationally mobile foreigners. These results would suggest that internationally mobile and foreign scientists struggle to advance in universities that lack rules preventing inbreeding and with little opportunity to teach in English.

A global assessment of academic promotion criteria: What really counts?

“…In the absence of a uniform research assessment system, institutions can tailor assessment strategies to their needs. However, differences between assessment systems that are uniform at a national level pose a challenge for international mobility [40]. Potential obstacles are a particular issue for early-career researchers (ECRs) from scienti cally weakly-developed countries, for whom international experience makes a large difference [41].…”

Eurowhiteness in Science: Privilege Escalation and Intentional Sludge

“…And while most of these institutions appreciate diversity, they are not, in fact, diverse at all. Statistics also prove this: for example, a study found that in Belgium, 21.9% of non‐mobile post‐docs became professors at Flemish universities, compared to internationally mobile (foreign) scholars, where the same rate was only 1.2% (Seeber, Debacker, Meoli & Vandevelde, 2022).…”