Facing the difficulties and the new challenges that COVID-19 has created
for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), the future needs to analyse and reflect on
this crisis. Considering the increasing value of international mobility in Portuguese
HEIs in the last decades, this research aims to study the effect of the COVID-19
pandemic on the flow of student and faculty mobility. Since international students,
as well as teaching staff mobility, are an asset for many HEIs, this study will be
applied to the Instituto Politécnico de Bragança (IPB), an institution located in the
interior of Portugal where the weight of international students is quite significant. The
paper provides an overview of the mobility flows between the period 2004/2005 and
the 2020/2021 academic year. According to the findings obtained, the restrictions on
international physical mobility are observed as the biggest challenges that occurred in
IPB during the COVID-19. From the results presented, a sharp growth in international
mobility flows is evident until the 2018/2019 academic year, as a consequence of
the investment made by the IPB’s presidency, in which one of the pillars of the
institution’s growth is based on the internationalisation strategy. Afterwards, in the
last two academic years, there has been a sharp decline; both in terms of student
mobility, on average, there was a decrease of around 26.0%, and faculty mobility, on
average, there was a decrease of approximately 55%.
