Student mobility under the Erasmus+ generates many positive repercussions even though it could still be improved by way of more simple application procedures and better performance indicators. This is the observation made by the European Court of Auditors in a special report published in 23 languages on Thursday 6 September.
The Erasmus+ programme has a budget of €16 .45 billion for the 2014-2020 period. It supports education and training, youth and sports. The report particularly focuses on key action No.1, which covers the mobility of students and staff in higher education, vocational education and training, adult education, school teaching staff and young people. This section also covers the joint Erasmus Mundi Masters and loans for the Erasmus+ Masters. The main observation made by the Court of Auditors focuses on the programme assessment. The auditors consider that the indicators used to measure programme performance are not sufficiently aligned on its objectives. Recommendations call for them to “improve the measurement of objectives achieved and prioritise performance when allocating funds”.
Failure of loan guarantee mechanism
Another observation made by the auditors highlights the fact that the loan guarantee mechanism is not working. This system was negotiated at great length at the time by the co-legislators and provides partial guarantees to financial intermediaries regarding the loans granted “in the most favourable conditions” to students undertaking postgraduate studies, such as a masters diploma in another country participating in the programme. As the Court points out, the objective is to provide €3 billion in loans to 200,000 Masters students by 2020. By the end of 2017, this system was only functioning by way of a single intermediary in France, Turkey (outgoing students only) and Spain (students both entering and leaving). By this date, only 358 Masters students had received a loan of this kind.
According to the report, one of the reasons for the lack of attractiveness to financial intermediaries could be due to the fact that regulation is not flexible enough with regard to protecting lenders and does not sufficiently take into account current market practices. Moreover, the mechanism only has a limited target population (Masters students), which excludes a large number of students and makes the participation of financial intermediaries appear even less attractive to them. The auditors are therefore recommending that the student loans guarantee mechanism also applies to doctoral and undergraduate students.
Variety of recommendations made
The report puts forward a whole range of recommendations including: extending the Erasmus + Mobility to students and looking at ways of making the conditions more flexible when applied to PhD students; examining the possibility of re-establishing the funding of traditional language learning in class; further simplifying the system in an effort to reduce administrative costs, whilst improving computer tools. The draft report can be seen at the following link https://bit.ly/2Qa4iEs. (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)