The ‘Benefits of Brussels’ to British higher education

With the bold title of the 'Benefits of Brussels', the United Kingdom higher education sector, under the banner of the UK HE International Unit, has just held a joint event in London with the venerable German and French cultural institutions, DAAD – the German Academic Exchange Service – and on the French side the Institut Français in the UK.

These organisations have been in the habit of exchanging views on higher education policy and practice over the last few years. But this year had a special resonance.

The new political climate in which populist parties attract significant support across Europe, as demonstrated in the recent European Parliament elections, is having a dramatic effect within the UK.

Old EU watchers are saying publicly that, for the first time since UK entry in 1973, they see a long slow slide taking place which makes Brexit – British exit from the EU – imaginable. Present government strategy is losing Britain its European partners and friends.

Resistance

However, there are now signs of resistance from several UK policy sectors to the most negative scenarios. It is also evident that some urgent reflection is taking place.

The 'Benefits of Brussels' conference was a good example, bringing into the British debate a sense of the different strategies being adopted in the UK and elsewhere to secure the benefits of European membership for the higher education sector.

Let me cite three.

The first comes from the British. At governmental level, the British have very effectively cut to the obvious gains. They have pursued a strategy of getting a major share of European research funding. Vice chancellors have taken a public stand on what a loss this would be under the hypothetical Brexit.

At the conference Paul Boyle, who has just stepped down as chief executive of the Economic and Social Research Council, confirmed the advantages of an open economy and some of the practices that grow out of it.

He cited the UK’s academic recruitment practice based on rules rather than cronyism. Appointing the brightest and best regardless of origin has brought significant gains to the nation’s universities. That helps produce the conditions in which frontier research and scholarship flourish.

UK universities do disproportionately well in European programmes such as Horizon 2020 and in hosting the holders of European Research Council grants. UK universities are doubly fortunate. In many countries much of this funding filters away to non-university institutes.

The second comes from Germany. In contrast to the British, the Germans have gone for long-term strategies in Europe and beyond, with academic exchange in all forms being an intrinsic part.

The Germans are pace setters on student mobility. Where the EU aims of 20% of students with some learning experience outside their home country by 2020 – already ambitious by British standards – the Germans already have 30% and aim for 50%.

Sebastian Forhrbeck, DAAD’s director of internationalisation and communication, paints a scenario that is unfamiliar to the British. Germany does not see internationalisation in terms of immediate commercial interest, he says. It does not charge incoming international students fees. It encourages them to stay on to work and 30% do so and their taxes reimburse the cost.

The government gives extra funds to German students who study abroad. It does not worry about brain drain. “Given the demographic problem our aim is to gain long term friends for Germany: we need students from elsewhere.

“As for the ones who study abroad: we see them as future entrepreneurs. Most return after maybe 10 or 15 years with valuable experience. With 50% of our GDP coming from exports, we need Germans who understand the world,” says Forhrbeck.

The third strategy has grown out of different forms of European union and the Bologna process. Europe has sprouted collaborative initiatives over the past decade and continues to do so.

The strategies for common frameworks for quality assurance and diploma recognition are familiar but also, as the conference emphasised, there are important frameworks for discussion, debate and peer learning on such issues as different forms of doctorate, the implementation of joint degrees and university-business collaboration, and a newer concern – how to lessen the marked disparities in research and innovation capacity across the EU.

The Erasmus family of programmes, in operation since 1987, has institutionalised collaboration between European systems. They have come a long way from student exchange and obligatory inter-university cross-border cooperation under Erasmus Mundus, to the 2014-20 programme Erasmus+, which bridges sectors and continents.

All those can change student lives. But, as summarised by the academic registrar of the University of Swansea, Huw Morris, who has helped set up several joint degree programmes, they do educate those involved organisationally about such fundamental issues as trust and how to understand risk and, in the process, build commitment to acting together for educational ends.

“We could not have done all this by international bilateral agreements,” said Morris.

The negatives

But if that is a ‘Thanks, Europe’ intervention from the UK, it will not have escaped the organisers that quite a list of negatives for the UK came up in discussion.

The level of fees is a constant complaint by those who wish to cooperate. So are the limited language skills of most British students.

Florence Gaillet, from the University of Bordeaux, who co-organises an undergraduate programme for a joint degree with the University of Cardiff, echoes a study by the Higher Education Policy Institute that also merits reflection. National learning styles are very different. British students expect to work less than their continental peers.

The most political critique is that there is another side of the coin to Britain’s open door policy for European researchers. Gergely Pröhle, a Hungarian senior civil servant with responsibilities for manpower policy, described the problem: Hungary loses.

Academics and international relations officers from Strasbourg and the Viadrina University at Frankfurt upon Oder in Germany’s east, however, described two projects that might point to an EU solution: the Horizon 2020 initiative supports ‘teaming and twinning’ between universities with substantial research and innovation capacity (mostly old member states), and those that have little (mostly central and eastern Europe).

That seems like a story to follow both in its own terms and as an example of what Europe collectively can do to work for solutions that are beyond the capacity of a single state - a 'Benefit of Brussels' for Europe and not merely for individual nation states.

* Dr Anne Corbett is an Associate in the European Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.