Archive / Magazine / Society / Mobility / Article | 07/05/2008

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

A million and a half students have already studied abroad under Erasmus – the European educational exchange programme, which celebrated its twentieth birthday last year. Now the programme is to receive a funding boost so that more students can study in a greater range of countries.

Sharing a room in a student hostel with two other students was a really Polish experience for Martin Brand, a twenty-four-year old politics student from Berlin who spent the winter semester of 2006 at the Jagellonia University in Krakow on an Erasmus grant. For him this was "the easiest and least complicated way of spending a short time at a foreign university."

Photo: photocase

More than a million and a half young adults have gone to study in other European countries since the exchange programme was launched in 1987.

There are currently thirty-one countries to choose from. Alongside the twenty-seven EU states, students can also go to Norway, Liechtenstein, Iceland or Turkey. Spain is the most popular destination, and welcomes around 25,000 foreign students every year. Spain became known as a good place to party long before Cédric Klapisch's Erasmus comedy L'auberge Espagnole (Euro Pudding), a film about students who spend a year in Barcelona, came out in 2002. Germany is the third most popular country, coming after France but ahead of Britain.

Anecdotes and Career Prospects

He would like to have gone to Britain, Martin Brand says, but there were one hundred applications for every place. He does not regret going to Poland – a decision motivated by having a Polish friend. "It has broadened my horizons, I have found Polish friends and more or less learnt the language.” One of the experiences he likes to relate – "without which no stay abroad today is complete”– are the insights he gathered into another country's bureaucracy. When he lost his student identity card he had to place an advertisement reporting the loss in the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza and then take the bill for the advertisement to the university administration in order to be issued with a new identity card.
Anecdotes like this are as much part of the Erasmus success story as the fact that 60 percent of those who have been abroad under the Erasmus programme say the time spent studying in another country was an advantage when they applied for their first job. European Commission President José Manuel Barroso speaks with satisfaction of "a real Europe, a Europe that produces results”; German Chancellor Angela Merkel enjoys experiencing Europe "close up”; and European Commissioner for Education Jan Figel' enthuses about the time students spend abroad under Erasmus as "a turning point in the lives of thousands of young people.”

Mitterrand Fired up by Erasmus

While clinking glasses over the success of Erasmus, many politicians like to forget that without students' determination to make it happen Erasmus would never have got off the ground. In 1986 the European Students' Forum AEGEE launched the first trans-European campaign to put the Erasmus idea into practice. Students in several countries held meetings with politicians. Yet despite the intense lobbying campaign the project threatened to run aground in March 1987 owing to the indifference of European politicians – until AEGEE leader Franck Biancheri plucked up the courage to cut through the friendly small talk at a dinner with Francois Mitterrand and approach the French President directly. His boldness might have been considered an affront, but Mitterrand listened – and was very taken with the idea. The very next day the media quoted him as saying he would find it "unacceptable if a couple of million ECUs couldn't be drummed up for this project.” That same year the first 3,000 students set off for destinations all over Europe.

Erasmus Goes Global

Four years ago Erasmus began opening its doors to the world. The main idea behind "Erasmus mundus” is to promote outstanding trilateral European Master's programmes for which students from non-EU countries can apply for grants. It also allows EU citizens to study at partner universities all over the world. The idea is to attract and train foreign talent in order to counteract the anticipated shortage of qualified personnel. By 2015 Europe will have acquired 12.5 million additional jobs for highly qualified personnel and 9.5 million jobs requiring medium-level qualifications.

Only for the Rich?

Erasmus has given a major boost to educational mobility, but there is still much to be done. There are still too few students participating in the programme: Only one European student in a hundred takes advantage of what Erasmus has to offer. Although fees for foreign students are wavered by the host countries, many students from poorer countries are put off by the high cost of living abroad. They receive a supplement of only 150 euros a month and there has been no increase since 1993.
A special evaluation of the most recent social survey conducted by the German students' organization Deutsches Studentenwerk (DSW) showed twice as many students from well-off families spent part of their study time abroad as their less well-to-do peers. DSW President Rolf Dibiscat has therefore called for all students to be mobile "irrespective of their origins or their parents' incomes.”

More Money for the Future

The EU plans to improve the situation, including making 3.1 billion euros available by 2012 to allow 3 million students to study in forty-five countries and become acquainted with other cultures. Martin Brand still recalls telling his roommate German Polish jokes. The Polish student responded by taking him to a cemetery on 1 November and showing him the graves of Poles who died in the Second World War.
For the European economy a more mobile workforce can only be a bonus, for currently European companies are losing 11 percent of their orders because their staff have an insufficient knowledge of foreign languages and other cultures. Even if English is widely used as the language of business, Spanish is more useful for business contacts with Latin America, and for Eastern Europe it is better to speak Russian, German or Polish. So Martin Brand is well equipped for the future.

Christoph Mayerl

Born in 1976, Christoph Mayerl studied journalism, philosophy and politics in Eichstätt, Bavaria. He works as a free-lance journalist in Berlin.
» to author index

Nikola Richter

Nikola Richter, born 1976 in Bremen, lives in Berlin. She works as an editor for euro|topics and as a writer. Her latest publications were "Schluss ...
» to author index

Further articles on the subject » Education, » Europe
More from the press review on the subject » Education, » Europe