In an increasingly competitive university world, the diversity of nationalities of students depends, among other things, on the diversity of national «starting points», and thus on the conditioning, trajectories and objective perspectives for the future. Going abroad is a choice that is made in relation to other possible alternatives, and the range of these choices is determined within national academic and professional structures. After a brief overview of the Italian presence in France and the French presence in Italy, in this article we will look at the proportion of these nationalities in the population of foreign students enrolled in higher education institutions in the countries studied and its recent evolution. Finally, we will focus mainly on mobility through the Erasmus programme between France and Italy, to support the thesis that the choices made by Erasmus students remain closely linked to their employment prospects after leaving the university, which are themselves extremely sensitive to the general state of the segments of the national labour markets. Institutionalised student mobility, particularly from Italy to France has much in common with other forms of spontaneous mobility. Student mobility is sometimes predictive of other mobility and contributes to the construction of European or international profiles.