EMI and DMI, an elitist language learning approach? An investigation of students’ socio-economic and language profiles

Internationalisation of higher education has really taken off in recent decades, with universities increasingly organising all or parts of their study programmes in a language other than their traditional language of instruction. Usually, that language is English, which is referred to as English Medium Instruction (EMI), but there are also programmes in other foreign languages, such as Dutch Medium Instruction (DMI) in French-speaking Belgium. Previous research links EMI with access inequity. This study investigates whether this inequity also exists in French-speaking Belgium and whether it extends to DMI by examining the socio-economic and language profiles of students in unilingual programmes versus multilingual programmes with DMI and/or EMI courses. An online questionnaire was administered to undergraduate law, political sciences, and economics & management students at a French-speaking university in Belgium. The results indicate that multilingual programmes attract students of higher socio-economic status (SES) and those who benefited from Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) school education, extracurricular activities or more classes in Dutch or English at secondary level. Taken together, these findings suggest that multilingual higher education with DMI/EMI in French-speaking Belgium is closely linked with access inequity. The article ends with suggestions for institutions offering or considering multilingual higher education.