Could Europe achieve higher impact with a lighter touch?

On 16 July 2025, the European Commission published its proposal for Erasmus+ programme regulation 2028-2034. It’s a sober text to be negotiated with the EU Council and Parliament in the coming two years.

The scope of the programme is two-fold: learning opportunities for all and capacity-building support among organisations and for policy development. The devil will be in the more detailed work programmes and calls. I read the underlying programme objectives as being about ‘more effective education’ and ‘increased interoperability’ within and across national systems.

Programme effectiveness is also a concern for the European Commission. The proposal states that Erasmus+ should “refine the focus of its cooperation activities, including by reviewing funding models, raising the relevance of target groups involved and a better focus on increasing capacity building and raising quality”.

So how can we best increase programme effectiveness and raise impact faster for wider audiences? The following are some suggestions.

Let European universities be overtly thematic

The concept of institution-wide cooperation in groups of six to nine universities, as outlined in the European Universities Initiative which is primarily funded through the Erasmus+ programme, turns out to be almost unachievable due to the wide range of diverse programmes on offer at universities (and with that, the high numbers of researchers, teachers and other staff involved) and the limited subject area match among partners.

Many interesting activities are being undertaken with great enthusiasm, but it seems highly improbable that an entire corps of teachers and researchers of one university, whose work is highly dependent on all kinds of (external) developments, would find their ideal suitable counterparts, also lasting for a longer period of time, within a combination of a limited number of pre-defined, often unequal, institutions.

The fact that most teachers and researchers cannot find suitable counterparts within the partnership was highlighted in the January 2025 Commission Report on the potential and outcomes of the initiative. The bulk of academic cooperation and student mobility will therefore remain outside the alliances. It would be more pragmatic and natural to give up the claim of institution-wide cooperation and allow European universities to be overtly thematic, as some are already.

In the past this was the case for Erasmus Interuniversity Cooperation Programmes (ICPs) and Erasmus Thematic Networks and more recently in the region-orientated Centres of Vocational Excellence (CoVE).

According to this logic, the chosen theme of a European university could be disciplinary, inter-disciplinary or horizontal (such as global citizenship). The thematic approach would bring focus, depth and scale to the cooperation.

It would facilitate content innovation and collaboration with industry in strategic sectors of European interest (for instance, joint study programmes, work placements, dual careers and applied and fundamental research). Academics would feel ownership.

Thematic alliances could consist of an inner circle of more active members (say 30) and various outer circles sharing and contributing. Universities could join several alliances in parallel, as in Olympic circles.

Third-country institutions would be welcome too, fostering international cooperation and benchmarking. The number of end-users benefitting and the impact on their life and career would be incomparably higher than is possible under the current, rather restrictive, institution-wide cooperation format.

Award European labels to collaborative programmes

Joint Study Programmes are back! They were the predecessors of the Erasmus programme way back in the eighties. In the new Erasmus+ proposal, they stand for a well-calibrated combined learning offer that, according to the European Commission, should eventually lead to a new degree on national law books, jointly issued by different institutions.

Member states are hesitant but have agreed on a joint European degree ‘label’ as a first step.

A lofty goal, but jointly issued European degrees are also almost unachievable due to a series of significant, almost insurmountable, barriers identified in the March 2024 Commission Staff Working Document. The document lists barriers in the field of accreditation and quality assurance, programme and curricular structure, governance structure, student enrolment and admission.

Twenty-five years of the Bologna Process and 20 years of Erasmus Mundus did not solve those issues. After all these years, only a few dozen degrees exist that are really jointly issued and delivered by all partners, and they cater for very few students.

Accordingly, it seems about time to pragmatically consider a lighter-touch alternative. We have it in our hands. It is called Erasmus+, the programme under which 400,000 students a year spend a substantial part of their studies abroad.

They follow study paths that, in content and organisation, are comparable to the envisaged joint study programmes, albeit with a lighter touch. Partner universities involved recognise each other’s quality, learning outcomes and credits in learning agreements (legal instruments), often focusing on electives.

The resulting degrees – collaborative single, double or multiple – are formally institutional or national but materially European. This is quite an achievement in terms of jointness de facto and de jure, something to be proud of and built upon without much ado.

Let’s therefore count our blessings and festively award the European label to all types of collaborative programmes, thousands of them, without specifying further conditions in terms of governance format or coordination. All degrees in Europe have the right to be recognised.

They are delivered by enthusiastic staff and are all the better if they have a European dimension.

Universities are, of course, free to impose more stringent rules on their departments, and grant-givers – for example, Erasmus Mundus, may have their own special wishes – but we must bear in mind that the maximalist approach is hardly replicable and definitely not scalable.

The envisaged next step, a new legally established European degree, is not necessary to make collaborative programmes visible to the world and appreciated by employers. The label, some marketing and a synchronised diploma supplement can do the trick.

Nor is there a need to re-evaluate joint study programmes largely composed of parts provided by institutions which are already accredited by European Quality Assurance Register (EQAR)-registered agencies. More effective education and functioning interoperability are what matter for students, staff and institutions.

Consider degree modules to be micro-credentials

Micro-credentials are the ultimate lighter-touch tool. They fill an important gap, opening up higher education landscapes and labour markets that were until recently dominated by degree monopolies, effectively blocking peoples’ careers and personal development.

All university modules today already enjoy learning outcomes, credits, levels, quality assurance, stackability and certification (verifiable authenticity), which are prerequisites for micro-credentials according to the EU definition. Appropriately, introducing micro-credentials should be relatively easy.

The Erasmus+ transcript of records certifies module-acquired competences for returning mobile students close to three million times a year. Not all degree modules will immediately be accessible to students from other programmes at home or elsewhere, let alone to non-degree students.

But they can be unlocked, step-by-step, by volunteering institutions that deserve generous output-based support at national and European levels to achieve this. Private sector provision is growing as well, so competition and state aid issues with the public sector need to be addressed urgently.

Universities also produce, and monetise, micro-credentials outside degree programmes for personal or professional development. They can issue micro-credential certificates to individuals who have not followed a course but are able to demonstrate, by a test or a portfolio assessment, learning outcomes acquired elsewhere, through prior learning or through work or life experience.

This validating role, an academic prerogative, can open up a whole new area of university activity with high recruitment and resource potential.

In 2022, the EU Council of Education and Employment Ministers adopted two recommendations to promote micro-credentials in combination with ‘Individual Learning Accounts’ for co-financing the learner take-up.

A pragmatic approach to accessibility, connecting offer and demand in lifelong learning across sectoral silos, building on what already exists. Their roll-out, too timid at present, could become the real game changer in view of establishing ‘learning opportunities for all’.

Fund outputs rather than governance formats

Also for funding, there seem to be strong arguments to look for a lighter touch that is theme-focussed, actor-driven and output-based:

• Well-chosen and well-described outputs: EU grant support could be geared towards high-leverage outputs in priority areas. Outputs that would serve larger swaths of target populations more directly, rather than focusing on complex governance formats that tend to marginalise academics, as seen with the European Universities Initiative.

The choice of priority areas and outputs could be made subject to public debate. I would plead for outputs that foster more effective education (for instance, benchmarking and improving study programmes in strategic sectors) and increased interoperability (for instance, all-in digital course catalogues, based on shared European Commission-supported specifications).

• Clear units of measurement: Credible outputs need good content descriptions. They also need units of measurement based on clearly formulated criteria as regards activity, scope, period, partners, quality and impact.

Applicants could then sign up to calls by presenting their own baselines and targets for the outputs listed, for instance, the number of self-awarded degree labels. The system can be automated to a large extent, reducing the need for lengthy grant applications and reviews.

• Ex-post grants: For comparable activities, funding upfront could gradually be replaced by generous ex-post grants, funds disbursed after a project or activity has been completed and results have been achieved (for example, per European degree label), except for newcomers who may still need seed money.

Overheads paid should benefit output actors more directly, such as the teachers involved. Grants could decrease when certain thresholds are reached (for example, for subsequent batches of European degree labels), favouring the entrance of newer and smaller applicants.

Digitalise higher education standards to increase system interoperability

The Erasmus programme not only boosted student mobility and collaboration among academics. In four decades, the programme also helped to develop new standards, reference frameworks and tools such as the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System, the European Qualifications Framework and EQAR, now generally accepted as ‘European public goods’, surpassing their EU and European Higher Education Area policy umbrellas and considered integral to national law and practice.

Further digitalisation of these public goods, using artificial intelligence, could substantially increase the interoperability of systems and foster student agency, for instance, through the spread of user-friendly student registration and course comparison apps.

The 2025 ‘Manifesto’ for a European higher education interoperability framework points us in the right direction.

Publish Institutional Recognition Records

While we are at it, we should ask our universities to publish online their own Institutional Recognition Records, or IRR, as suggested in the 2024 EU Council Recommendation ‘Europe on the Move’. Recognition records keep track of earlier recognition decisions regarding degrees and modules or micro-credentials from partners and third parties.

Their publication, by the universities in charge, would introduce the notion of recognition ‘predictability’ at the programme level (specifying, case by case, the more general and less informative rights laid down in conventions and treaties).

Normal admission criteria (such as available places) would still need to be fulfilled, of course, but the records may allow us to finally close the ‘automatic’ recognition debate.

The publication of the European Commission’s proposal for Erasmus+ programme regulation 2028 to 2034 is a good opportunity to think deeply about how we can improve the effectiveness of the European university system through an approach that is theme-focused, actor-driven and output-based, with lighter-touch interventions, building on decades of Erasmus+ experience.

Peter van der Hijden is an independent European higher education expert living in Brussels. See higher-education-strategy.eu/.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.