Erasmus+ continues to have strong appeal for higher education institutions, but concerns over unreliable digital tools remain.
As education stakeholders across Europe are waiting for the official Erasmus+ mid-term evaluation, the European University Association (EUA) published their timely appraisal of the Erasmus+ programme. The report presents the results of a survey among Higher Education institutions (HEIs) involved in the programme, collecting over 500 responses across 49 countries from late 2022 to early 2023. Drawing on this pooled expertise, the EUA consolidated 17 recommendations how Erasmus+ may be strengthened and its positive impact on the higher education sector sustained.
Erasmus+, with its programming period from 2021 to 2027, for the first time formalised the previous “cross-cutting objectives” through four horizontal priorities: inclusion and diversity, digital transformation, environment and fight against climate change, and participation in democratic life. While these priorities are generally welcomed by the HE community, the report shows differences in their perceived progress in these areas. The programme’s success of transporting democratic values as well as its impact on inclusion and diversity is judged positively, although survey respondents point to difficulties of identifying the right target group for inclusion initiatives and reaching these individuals with communication efforts around programme benefits. Moreover, the focus on “green” mobility is considered to raise awareness among mobile students and staff, but top-ups are considered insufficient for travellers to opt for sustainable transport modes.
The community further seems divided whether Erasmus+ has really achieved programme simplification compared to its predecessor, with many HEIs indicating that the programme was neither easier to implement (57%) nor to apply to (33%). Nevertheless, nearly three-quarters of respondents were content with application success rates, grant sizes and flexibility of using awarded grants.
The survey results illustrate that Key Action 1, mostly comprising out- and incoming staff and student mobility, continues to be extremely popular among HEIs. Importantly, Erasmus+ has also become an attractive means to enable students to go on exchange outside of the EU: 3 out of 4 HEIs indicated that international credit mobility to third countries, not associated to the programme, are an attractive programme component. However, some critique is voiced in terms of slim funding for mobility to geographical regions which are outside of the prioritised regions, which include Africa and the Western Balkans.
One crisis impacting mobility patterns during the evaluation period was the war in Ukraine. As a response, the programme foresaw special help to Ukrainian students, which has been positively received by the HE community. The initiative further inspired claims to introduce a ‘Student at Risk’ support scheme, modelled after the Researchers at Risk scheme under Horizon Europe.
Notably, the COVID-19 pandemic, which also occurred during the first years of Erasmus+, led to a decrease in number of mobilities, which had not yet recovered at the time of survey closure (February 2023). In this context, virtual mobility received considerable interest and is also discussed in the report. While a majority of HEIs appreciate blended intensive programmes (BIPs), which combine physical and virtual mobility components, there are concerns around the effort of setting up BIPs being disproportionally high compared to grant sizes.
One of the most critical weaknesses of Erasmus+, however, remain its digital tools and processes, which also lie at the core of virtual mobility. More than half of the participating HEIs indicated that the available digital tools are neither reliable nor robust. This leads to a broad fear that continued problems with digital tools may undermine beneficiaries’ trust and could tarnish the outstanding reputation of the Erasmus brand.
Overall, strong support by HEIs is illustrated for Key Action 2 (KA2), encompassing transnational cooperation projects through different formats. The community seems to agree that KA2 is an important venue of testing and implementing instruments central to the European Education Area. Several individual activity formats under KA2 are also rated positively, including Partnerships for Cooperation, Capacity Building projects, and Cooperation partnerships for European NGOs. However, survey respondents identified several ways through which the European Commission could impact KA2 positively: First, the community considers that their combined experience and expertise in the programme is not leveraged sufficiently at the moment, with many public consultations on new programme elements (such as lump sums) being too short notice and with a small scope of consulted partners. Second, while the Commission regularly organises trainings and events to encourage peer learning and best practices exchange for programme management among applying HEIs, there seems to be a lack of information among beneficiaries regarding the content of other funded projects. Giving applicants a good overview of which projects have been selected for funding could enable the community to create synergies between projects and avoiding duplication of their work.
Such linkages have already been created between the different alliances under the European University Initiative (see SwissCore article), which the survey respondents evaluated, in a nutshell, as: ‘challenging – but worth the effort’. Notably, 87% indicated that they were in favour of better mechanisms to involve partners from third countries, like Switzerland, in their alliance. With this comprehensive evaluation, the EUA has contributed an important puzzle piece to how Erasmus+ impacts the education sector. In the coming weeks and months, it remains to be seen in how far these results are in line with the experience of other sectors and how these insights may shape the new programme generation 2028-2034.