As every year, ACA will start its 2015 series of events with the habitual What’s new in Brussels?  seminar, presenting the new EU programmes in education and research. This time round, the focus will be especially on the new Erasmus+ Programme, launched in January 2014 and ongoing until 2020.
Seminar Programme and Registration: ACA. More...

Starting from the beginning of January, the new ACA study mapping English-taught Program (ETPs) in Europe will be available. The publication covers 28 countries in continental Europe and included only programmes 100% taught in English, at the Bachelor and Master level. It will be available free of charge online as PDF, or in the printed version that could be purchased through the ACA Secretariat or through the Publisher - Lemmens. More...

In November 2014, ACA and its German member DAAD kicked off a joint study entitled University quality indicators: A critical assessment for the European Parliament. The study, to be carried out in a framework contract between the ACA-DAAD consortium and the European Parliament, aims to critically assess the differences between quality assurance systems and university ranking schemes, and the pros and cons of the two distinct approaches for assessing/enhancing/indicating the quality of university teaching and research. Based on the results of the study, policy recommendations will be made to the EU’s policymakers for the further development of transparent quality assessment and assurance systems in Europe and of the U-Multirank which has been funded by the European Commission.
The Bologna Process: Stocktaking and Prospects, European Parliament: European Parliament
ERASMUS FOR ALL (2014-2020): European Parliament. More...

ACA is happy to announced that it started to work on the Mastermind Europe project, a three-year ambitious initiative coordinated by the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VUA), and involving nine other European partners namely the German Rectors’ Conference (HRK), the Catalan Association of Public Universities (ACUP), the University of Helsinki, Vilnius University, the University of Ljubljana, the Polytechnic University of Milan, the University of Graz, StudyPortals and Ziggurat. More...

As from 1st January 2015 the Rectors' Conference of Swiss Universities (CRUS), founded in 1904, will be dissolved and its Secretariat will merge in the General Secretariat of swissuniversities, the new joint national Conference of Rectors of all three conferences that currently exist in Switzerland: CRUS, the Rectors' Conference of Switzerland University of Applied Sciences (KFH) and the Swiss Conference of Rectors of Universities of Teacher Education (COHEP). The General Secretariat of swissuniversities will be in Bern. More...

International connectedness is becoming increasingly common, and increasingly important. For this reason, from 1 January 2015, the European Platform and Nuffic will be joined in a new alliance that will be able to offer more than the sum of their existing parts. The new organisation, called EP-Nuffic, will cater for the entire Dutch education sector, providing support and advice in matters of internationalisation. More...

Participate in the first ever Virtual Study Abroad Fair on 25 February 2015. The fair, hosted by CollegeWeekLive, the Institute of International Education, and the U.S. Department of State, is a unique opportunity to reach a large number of U.S. students who are considering pursuing a study, intern, or service learning opportunity abroad. More...

Beyond the traditional appointments with ‘What's new in Brussels?’ at the beginning of 2014 and our annual Conference ‘Europe in the world’ in July, where we featured the recent higher education developments in Europe and across the globe, ACA organised a number of events. Some of them were related to themes that we have long been following, such as the April Seminar on Funding student mobility – built upon the expertise of our studies and publications such as Portable state grants and loans: An overview and their contribution to outgoing student mobility that was out at the beginning of the year - or the December Seminar on English-medium instruction in Europe, related to our latest study on the topic, available from January 2015. However, we also explored completely new territories with the seminar on Liberal Arts and Science Colleges that took place last October and contributed to expand our network of academic institutions, beyond our areas of expertise. More...

With the approaching of the end of the year, time has come to sum up where we stand with Education policies of the EU and its member states. The last Council meetings of the year synthetised some of the recent developments.
First, let us start with the financial concerns. On 9 December, EU finance ministers expressed broad support to the  new EUR 315 billion Investment Plan, presented on 26 November by the European Commission and aimed at getting “Europe growing again and get more people back to work”. According to the guidelines, this additional investment will target, among others, also education, research and innovation. The Commission is expected to submit a legislative proposal in January 2015 and the aim is to have it adopted by June 2015. In addition, European Parliament and Council’s negotiators reached a compromise on the EU budget, which could affect the level of education and research funding for the next year (see ACA Newsletter 'Education Europe', Edition November 2014). The deal includes extra payment appropriations of some EUR 3.5 billion for the 2014 budget while 2015 payment appropriations are set at EUR 141.21 billion, an amount closer to the Commission’s initial proposal than to the Council’s position. More...

US Parliament has recently drawn its attention on the academic overseas ties with countries like China and their pressure on foreign academics and institutions. On 4 December a US House of Representatives sub-committee began a hearing questioning whether American universities and schools are accepting restrictions on foundational principles of American academic freedom in order to be able to build campuses in China and to attract Chinese-government entities on their campuses. The witnesses speaking at the hearing denounced different sort of problems. More...