EUA survey : internationalisation of the higher education in Europe

25/08/2020
In April of this year, the European University Association (EUA) published the results of the internationalisation of European higher education institutions survey, with two specific points included : the international strategic institutional partnerships and the European Universities Initiative.
 
The main results emphasize that:
 
  • 52% of interviewed higher education institutions (HEI) have at least 10% of international students, and 20% of them have 20% of international students.
  • Student mobility (for 95% of respondents), EU research projects (91%) and staff mobility are the most important international activities carried out by the HEI. Only 9% of interviewed HEI have branch campuses abroad.
  • Erasmus + and Horizon 2020 are the most used programmes by the HEI to carry out their cooperation activities with their partners.
  • The improvement of the learning and teaching quality, the recruitment of international students and the development of strategic partnerships with a selected number of HEI abroad are the most important priorities cited by the respondents.
  • 87% of respondents have at least one strategic collaboration with partners abroad. This interest in such partnerships is not recent but there has been a certain growth over the last years. Indeed, 32% of the strategic partnerships of interviewed HEI have been in place for 10 years or more, but 36% of them have been established in the last one to four years.
  • The very large majority of interviewed HEI have a specific interest for the European Universities Initiative. Indeed, 87% of respondents have participated in at least one of the two pilot calls for proposals or wish to do so in the future.
  • For the interviewed HEI, the main challenges for participating in this initiative are the need to provide additional resources to support the implementation and development of these universities and the need to ensure the long-term sustainability of the network.
  • Only a minority of respondents received extra funding from their governments for the application or for the development and implementation after successful selection at the European level. In the first case, they are 12% and in the second case, 20%.
  • Follow-up grants beyond the first three years, the elimination of legal and administrative obstacles to facilitate the collaboration and activities into the networks, higher grants available per network (until now limited to 5 million euros), the development of the research dimension and strengthened synergies with other EU funding programmes are the five top recommendations cited by the majority of the respondents to ensure to success of the European Universities Initiative.
The full results are available here. 

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