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This culminated in the \u2018Youth on the Move\u2019 flagship initiative, aimed at enhancing the performance and international attractiveness of Europe\u2019s higher education institutions and raising the Union\u2019s overall education and training levels. Therefore, it is relevant to assess the performance of the \u2018Youth on the Move\u2019 initiative via the creation of composite indicators (CIs) and, ultimately, monitor the progress made by European countries in creating a positive environment supporting learner mobility. For this reason, we make use of the CI-building \u2018Benefit-of-the-Doubt\u2019 approach, in its robust and conditional setting to account for outliers and the human development of those nations, to exploit the European Commission\u2019s Mobility Scoreboard framework between 2015\/2016 and 2022\/2023. Furthermore, we incorporate the value judgements of experts in the sector to construct utility scales and compute weight restrictions through multi-criteria decision analysis. This enables the conversion of ordinal scales into interval ones based on knowledgeable information about reality in higher education. In the end, the results point to a slight performance improvement, but highlight the need to improve the \u2018Recognition of learning outcomes\u2019, \u2018Foreign language preparation\u2019, and \u2018Information and guidance\u2019.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1007\/s10479-024-06195-y","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2024,9,2]],"date-time":"2024-09-02T22:02:13Z","timestamp":1725314533000},"page":"1589-1619","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/springer_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":3,"title":["Learning mobility in European higher education: How has the Union\u2019s flagship initiative progressed?"],"prefix":"10.1007","volume":"351","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-5315-8229","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Miguel Alves","family":"Pereira","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Giovanna","family":"D\u2019Inverno","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Ana Santos","family":"Camanho","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]}],"member":"297","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2024,9,3]]},"reference":[{"issue":"1","key":"6195_CR1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"1","DOI":"10.1007\/s10479-014-1668-5","volume":"226","author":"M Afsharian","year":"2015","unstructured":"Afsharian, M., & Ahn, H. 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