British students missing out on EU study

Liam Burns, the president of the UK’s National Union of Students, said last week that too few UK students from underpriviledged backgrounds are benefiting from European Union grants to study abroad.

Burns, who was giving evidence at the House of Lords on EU plans to improve European education, said that those who studied abroad greatly improved their chances of employment. However, many in the UK lacked the confidence and awareness to take advantage of grants to study all or parts of their degrees abroad through the Erasmus programme.

“Lots of factors suggest that this is reaching the more privileged, and the less privileged aren’t getting these opportunities,” said Burns. “I think there needs to be a refocus, especially in the UK, on balance in mobility. This isn’t about volume, this is about what kind of student gets this opportunity.”

According to the British Council, Erasmus’s UK representative, UK participation in the Erasmus programme has been rising over the past four years, reaching 12,836 in 2010/11. However a 2009 HEFCE report shows that degree entrants who studied abroad were more likely to be female, younger, and from higher socio-economic classes.

Other obstacles to uptake included limited availability of UK student loans; an insufficient credit transfer system between European universities; and language barriers, said Burns.

Burns said he welcomed plans to expand the Erasmus programme (doubling the number of Europeans studying abroad from 400,000 to 800,000 by 2020) but that the UK government needed to do more to help UK students benefit from available opportunities and not encourage “more of the same”.

This would include extending the state-subsidised student loan system to help cover postgraduate living expenses (at the moment some 70% of postgraduates are not eligible for loans). And halting plans to remove the Erasmus fee waiver, which allows students not to pay home fees during their Erasmus “year abroad”.

UK universities also needed to do more to make students aware of Erasmus opportunities, said Burns. A survey on student experience conducted by the NUS with HSBC bank, showed that 11% of students were unaware of the Erasmus programme altogether, and 37% said financial barriers would prevent them from applying – suggesting further lack of knowledge about Erasmus grants which cover full fees.

Burns’ comments resonate given a British Council report released this month that suggests Britain is sending too few students abroad to create a workforce fit for the global economy. It found that 80% of UK employers considered “awareness of the wider world” more important than degree classification, but while 370,000 international students studied in the UK in 2009/ 10, just 33,000 UK students studied abroad.

The Chief Executive of the British Council, Martin Davidson, said: “It’s vital the British government continues to support the Erasmus fee-waiver scheme, so students who do go abroad for a year won’t have to continue paying their fees to their ‘home’ institution while they’re away.”