On Thursday 26 January, the European Commission launched a campaign to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the start of the Erasmus+ program for promoting student mobility in higher education. It also published the results from 2015, which were judged to be excellent, despite the fact that MEPs recently warned against some of the potentially negative effects of this success.
In a press release, the European Commission stated, “What started as a modest mobility scheme for higher education students back in 1987, with only 3,200 students in its first year, has developed over the last 30 years into a flagship programme” that has enabled 678,000 Europeans to study, train, work and engage in voluntary activities abroad.
Key figures from the 2015 report are drawn on and it asserts that €2.1 billion has been invested in more in 19,600 projects in which 69,000 organisations have been involved. It assesses the 10 new cooperation projects between higher education establishments and businesses (“Knowledge alliances”), eight project between study institutes and company and professional training initiatives (“sectoral skills alliances”) and 279 initiatives to strengthen education and youth work in developing countries (capacity reinforcement projects). It should also be pointed out that France, Germany and Spain are still the three main countries of origin for programme participants, while Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom are those that receive most participants.
A few days ago, however, the European Parliament’s Culture and Education Committee sounded the alarm to the Maltese Presidency of the Council of the EU about the current trend to impose increasing numbers of tasks on the programme – fight against radicalism, integration of migrants etc. without making any increases to the budget. Petra Kammerevert (S&D, Germany) stated at the time that, “If the European Solidarity Corps is added to the Erasmus+ programme’s scope of application, it will be necessary to look at providing additional funding” (see EUROPE 11710). (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)