Some thoughts from me on the news that the UK will be joining Erasmus+. So what does the Erasmus announcement mean for UK higher education and for Jisc.
Since Brexit the number of EU students attending UK higher education institutions fell sharply.
Brexit’s effects on student demographics also tell an alarming story. EU student degree intake in the UK has more than halved. From a vibrant community of over 150,000 in 2020-21 (the final year when home fees applied), the total EU-citizen enrolment slipped to just 75,000 by 2023-24, with a larger fall in first-year enrolment. EU students, once representing a quarter of all international students, have now shrunk to less than a tenth. While UK universities have not suffered financially and indeed have compensated by increasing income from non-EU international student fees, the transformation runs deeper than balance sheets.1
Re-joining Erasmus could potentially see the number of EU students attending UK universities increase, possibly back to even pre-Brexit levels. However, with the international student levy, we may see an overall decline in international student numbers.
One of the interesting aspects of re-joining Erasmus is the implications of this on the plan in the EU for a European Education Area where students can move between institutions and study when and where they want to. Despite the pre-eminence of national agendas in the education space, the EU Commission is looking to improve and enable greater student mobility. There has been substantial work on this by the various European University Alliances across the EU, the European Digital Education Hub 2, and it wouldn’t surprise you by the various NRENs across Europe as well.
Of course in the UK (well England), we have our own plans for student mobility with the LLE 3.
Europe has already undertaken a lot of work in the mobility space with the implementation of the European Higher Education Interoperability Framework 4. What the Erasmus news means is that student mobility between the EU and the UK will be easier (and cheaper) than it was, and the EU ambitions in relation to student mobility does mean that the UK should be thinking how UK higher education could be aligned to what is happening in Europe.
1 https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20251021121022353