Minister welcomes French higher education’s EU success
Higher education – European Higher Education Area (EHEA)/Frédérique Vidal congratulates the 16 French institutions involved in the European universities selected in 2020 – Communiqué issued by the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation
Paris, 9 July 2020
The European Commission today announced that it received 62 projects, testifying to a great diversity of approaches and involving more than 380 institutions from 32 European States. Given the quality of the projects submitted, the Commission decided to select 24 of them, including 14 which involve 16 French institutions. The allocation amounts to €120 million under the Erasmus+ programme. In total, the support the Commission is providing to all European universities amounts to €287 million.
The ambition of these European universities is to achieve an unprecedented level of cooperation between Europe’s higher education institutions, at every organizational level and in every field of activity (training, research and innovation). They should thus contribute to a more united and stronger Europe, open to the world, proud of its shared values and bringing together a new generation of Europeans capable of cooperating with different cultures, in a variety of languages and across borders and disciplines. In this way they will enable the quality, performance, attractiveness and international competitiveness of Europe’s higher education institutions to be significantly improved.
Frédérique Vidal, Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, welcomes the complete success of this second pilot call and the enthusiasm shown by many French institutions for getting involved with their European partners in this context. She congratulates the 16 French institutions coordinating or taking part in the winning projects. France thus ranks once again among the main contributors to this new tool of European integration, with a total of 32 institutions involved in 28 projects. These planned alliances between institutions from at least three European countries will begin their activities in the autumn term of 2020 and will each receive funding of €5 million over three years, to which €2 million will be added from the Horizon 2020 programme. Frédérique Vidal emphasizes the wish expressed by all the institutions to continue the cooperation projects started, with a view to creating alliances.
The Minister and the Secretary-General for Investment, Guillaume Boudy, announce that, as was done last year, the French institutions taking part in the projects chosen by the Commission will be supported financially thanks to the €100-million package released as part of the third phase of the Investing in the Future programme (PIA3). The State’s support will also aim to ensure that the activities set in motion by the alliances are fully realized.
Finally, the Minister and the Secretary-General for Investment pledge to continue, with their partners and the European Commission, the work on deploying these projects following this pilot phase, particularly in the framework of the next European budget, in order to establish in the long term, from 2022 onwards, the first European universities fully integrated for the benefit of European students’ education and integration into the workplace and of excellent research at continental level./.