Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-04-07-Speech-1-081"
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"en.20030407.6.1-081"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, first I wish to thank the rapporteur, Mrs De Sarnez, for her exhaustive survey of the Erasmus World programme and for her excellent cooperation, although we did not succeed in reaching consensus on quite everything. What is most important, however, is that the Committee on Culture, Youth, Education, the Media and Sport has managed to deal with the Commission proposal swiftly. I also hope that consensus can be quickly reached with the Council so that the programme can be got fully under way from the start of next year.
There is a clear need to make Europe a more attractive place and to strengthen the identity of European higher education. At present, the majority of international exchange students go to the United States of America. That country has a long tradition of receiving foreign students, in the form, for example, of Fulbright scholarships. Each year over half a million young people from other countries study in the United States. In Europe, the corresponding figure for the number of students from countries outside the Community is around 400 000. More than three quarters of them come to the United Kingdom, France or Germany: to the three big Member States.
The opportunities offered by European universities are thus hardly being taken up at all at the present time. The same goes for the added value that could be achieved through university networking. The Erasmus Mundus Masters Course programme aims to rectify all these failings by establishing a European Union Masters degree for students from third countries in partnership with three European higher education institutions.
In the Committee on Culture, Youth, Education, the Media and Sport we pay a great deal of attention to linguistic diversity in Europe. It is perhaps for that reason that the majority on the committee wanted to add the paragraph to Article 4 stating that the purpose of the programme is the ‘promotion of language skills, in particular by the use of two languages spoken in the countries in which the institutions involved in the Erasmus Mundus Masters Course are located’. I fear the worst, in that such a stringent rule will go against the basic aims of the programme. Erasmus Mundus is not a language programme: its purpose is to enhance the attractiveness of European higher education. Let us for example consider the case of a degree course in biotechnology under the Masters programme, to be undertaken in partnership with higher education institutions in Finland, Latvia and Estonia. I am sure a requirement to study the language of these countries would do little to enhance the attractiveness of the programme in the minds of young people interested in biotechnology. This is not a problem that just concerns the northern fringe of Europe, but just as much Portugal and Greece, for example. I certainly hope that this requirement, so precisely defined as it is, will be deleted in the vote in plenary."@en1
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