Education is a major factor in today’s global market economy – governments around the world have recognised it as a tool to notion of importance of adjustability to the economic circumstances for a successful life in their citizens. Unlike this perspective that belongs to the perspective of the technical rationality (Mušanović, 2000), the pedagogical humanistic perspective observes education as “education for becoming a human” (Komar, 2007, 301). The aim of this paper was to analyse the existing European mobility programmes in higher education and to investigate the students’ experience of international mobility in higher education from the critically pedagogical perspective. The first part of the paper aims to determine whether those education-related programmes were closer to the perspective of the technical rationality or the pedagogical humanistic perspective of education based on the critically pedagogical analysis of the overall aims of the European mobility programmes. Second part of the paper looks into the students' experience of the international mobility in higher education by using the qualitative research method of interview and the content analysis. The aim was to evaluate whether they were closer to the perspective of the technical rationality or the pedagogical humanistic perspective. The analysis of the European international mobility programmes in higher education shows that those programmes put more emphasis on the perspective of the technical rationality, that is on the needs of the capital market for which competencies have been listed that, according to the documents, need to be developed primarily for the needs of the capital market. On the other hand, the analysis of the students' experiences of international mobility in higher education shows that the students' opinions and experiences are greatly connected to the humanistic perspective, namely to the personal development.