New ACA publication and seminar on the actual use of portable grants and loans for student mobility

Queenie K.H. Lam & Dansja Oste with Irina Ferencz and Bernd Wächter, Portable grants and loans: An overview and their contribution to outgoing student mobility. ACA Papers on International Cooperation in Education. Bonn: Lemmens, 2013. ISBN 978-3-86856-011-4.
The portability of state grants and loans is considered one of the key elements contributing to the realisation of a European area for lifelong learning. Its centrality at the European Union level is therefore not in doubt. However, not enough is known about the conditions attached to portable grants and loans and their actual use by mobile students. A new ACA publication – Portable grants and loans: An overview and their contribution to outgoing student mobility – seeks to fill this information gap.
Analysis in this book indicates that portable state grants and loans do possess enormous “potential” for supporting outgoing student mobility. Over 25 European countries have allowed such national funds to be used outside their national borders. Among them, some 15 countries reported that their state grants and/or loans can be used, in principle, for both outgoing credit and degree mobility, offering annually at least 1.65 million students the “opportunities” to use such financial aid to study abroad. For degree mobility alone, around 60 500 students took up such opportunities. This number represents a small fraction of all the beneficiaries of student aid in Europe, but covers a substantial share of mobile students in systems that are “open for all”. More...