The impact of consortium characteristics on credit recognition performance: case study analysis of the Erasmus student mobility in frames of the ECIU consortium for the academic years 2007/2008 to 2011/2012

Credit recognition remains one of the largest problems of the Erasmus mobility programme. The European Commission and other higher education stakeholders propose the solution to the identified problem in more “structured” mobilities. One approach to the “structured” mobilities is the higher education consortium. The presented research reveals, what are the beneficial aspects of the higher education consortium on the credit recognition performance of the individual partner university. Due to the mobility within the consortium, the partner universities increase their credit recognition performance. The two most relevant consortium characteristics, which positively influence the credit recognition performance, are: a) the inter-organizational trust in academic quality of the mobility partners, and b) the idiosyncratic (tacit) dimension of language within the consortium. Collective sanctions have an opposite effect and repress the credit recognition performance. Moreover, the network positioning of empirical results additionally reveals, which partners mostly benefit from consortium mobilities. Universities, which are positioned in the part of the network with the highest network density, state better credit recognition performance.