37 French Institutions Are Now Part of European Universities Initiative
These alliances, with each of them collaborating with different French institutions, will have a €272 million budget at disposal. In addition, these new and existing alliances and institutions have allowed France to be considered the most committed country to this initiative, AtoZSerwisPlus.com reports.
“Europe makes progress towards its objective of an even deeper commitment of European higher education institutions and students in an initiative more than ever a factor of quality in training, scientific excellence, innovation and European civic spirit,” the French Ministry of Higher Education pointed out.
The 37 French institutions working on the alliance projects rank the country as the second-most represented in the programme. In addition, taking previous calls for the projects into account, France is also ranked among the most represented countries (37 institutions), listed between Germany (43 institutions) and Spain (33 institutions).
Furthermore, the European Commission revealed that four new alliances had been created, with each of those including a French institution, as follows:
- EU4Dual with Estia (Institute of Advanced Industrial Technologies)
- EU Green with the University of Angers
- Ingenium, with the University of Rouen Normandy
- UNigreen with Sup’biotech
The 24 alliances selected in 2020 and 44 European Universities take the total number to 340 institutions of higher education distributed in capitals and regions of 31 countries, including the Member States, Iceland, Norway, Turkey and Serbia.
The new call for proposals Erasmus+ 2022 may accept partners for alliances from countries included in the Bologna process, such as the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Ukraine.
As the European Commission points out, the goal of the European strategy for universities is to support 60 universities grouping into more than 500 higher education institutions by mid-May 2021. Thus, a new call for projects will be launched in 2022.
In order to reach this goal, a fund of €1.1 billion has been allocated to the Erasmus+ programme, which is planned to happen during the current organising period, in a bid to support the design of these alliances. Additionally, as the Commission says, the support of the Research side of European Universities will be compensated by another European initiative supervised by the Horizon Europe programme.