of our Future
When i Wasstarting my career in the international office of the University of Oulu, one of my first jobs was to assist in drafting their Institutional Contract. My then manager, the Director of International Affairs Marja Karjalainen, thumped the confidential programme draft that had arrived from Brussels in front of me and said:”Read that.” In no time we were drafting our first version of the Euro- pean Policy Statement.
Our unit was small. Everybody did everything.
It is year 2027. When I walk along the corridor of the international department of the headquarters of the Scandinavian Institute of Technology, my present em- ployer, I can count 20 offices and 35 names of staff next to the doors. There are a further 50 staff working in one way or another in international relations and mar- keting in the different campuses in Finland, Sweden and Norway. There are 10 other people apart from me preparing the next Erasmus Multi-Institutional Co- operation Agreement (MICA). When I was sweating in my tiny office, a slightly extended copy machine corner, in the early summer of 1995, I had no idea that thirty years on, the Erasmus programme would still be as inseparable a part of my year as the red August apples on our Lapland campus or the blossoming spring flowers in Joensuu in March.
The year 2027 marks a turning point for the EU youth and education pro- grammes. The current agreements come to an end, some of the old sub-pro- grammes end and some will be combined and renamed. This is then an excellent time to influence the development of the new programmes, to learn about past mistakes and to further develop the good points in Erasmus.
The education strategy of the EU is still being worked on, but it is clear that the fact that Russia, the western parts of China and Mongolia are joining the Eras- mus programme will have an impact in the future of higher education. Close co- operation between the EU and Russia started in the beginning of 2000. In the beginning it was carried out in working groups of the Commission’s directorates and the Russian ministries, and now, along the new programme, takes a public form. The new USA programme may also increase the number of American students in Europe considerably. The international consortium of Finnish higher education institutions is preparing the Finnish position statement on the new strategy led by FUCIMO, an organisation with its roots in the Centre for Inter- national Mobility CIMO. It is important that the consortium gets feedback from the field from the different campuses in Finland. The international offices have knowledge of what really matters and makes a difference in the day-to-day life of the programme.
The Finland that is gazing at the 2030s is perhaps in the best position in Europe to benefit from the new Erasmus programme, rumoured to be called New East- West-Collaboration = NEWT-C. The international consortium of the Finnish higher education institutions (SKKK) has already been successfully marketing and recruiting in Asia for years and the Finnish Universities Trading for Univer- sities in Russia and Sino-Trans-Asia (FUTURISTA) has been making Finnish higher education institution so well-known that the other Nordic countries as part of the Nordic Global University Conglomerate (NGUG) are now willing to join in the operations. It would seem that the organisation founded in 2012, that until now has been just a social club and an excuse for exotic travel of university management, will finally get a meaningful purpose.
wIll tHE adMInIStratIOn bECOME MOrE COMPlICatEd?
As the Erasmus programme widens, its administration becomes a critical issue. Managing mobility of masses and, for example, doing business as part of the EU Campus Asia (EUCA), part of the Action VII of the Trans-National Higher Edu- cation Business, require specialised skills. It remains to be seen how the EU will monitor these big and complicated projects. Those of us who still remember the Socrates programme (the sub-programme of which Erasmus was about twenty years ago) do not wish to see a return to the centrally planned economy of 1995– 1997 when information about each exchange student had to be input in advance in the FoxPro database that was constantly collapsing. The reporting system of the early phase of the Socrates programme is not to be taken as a model either. Although the EU has allocated resources to development of the Asian higher edu- cation system and its administration, structures and education, it is still unclear how the new Erasmus countries will administer the programmes. The Sapporo process that aims at introducing the standards of the Japanese higher education system – which are naturally very USA-led – in the Pacific region and even in parts of Russia add their flavour to the structural changes.
If we are looking for good practices from the past as a model to the new NEWT- C programme, we cannot underestimate the important role of the national agen- cies. In Finland, the importance of CIMO grew hand-in-hand with the user- friendliness of the programme: the more higher education institutions were in contact with CIMO, the better informed they were and the easier the work of the Erasmus coordinator. The transformation of CIMO into the Finnish Universities Center for International Marketing and Opportunity in 2013 by mutual agree- ment of the Ministry of Education, Research and Communications and the In- ternational Consortium of Finnish Higher Education Institutions SKKK and co- owned by them, was a success. The needs of the higher education institutions were taken into account better and having university representatives in the board of governors of FUCIMO has made it possible to influence Finnish higher edu- cation policy directly.
Although FUCIMO has been actively informing about the planning of the new programme, a lot remains unknown. One of the most significant changes relates
to the agreement between higher education institutions. The agreements, which were introduced during the first phase of the Socrates programme, are the ba- sis of the Erasmus programme. Before them, activities were based on so-called ICP networks. The new NEWT-C programme would appear to incorporate a strong element of exporting and marketing of education. What kind of agree- ments should we be making for these kinds of activities? According to SKKK, the international and marketing units of higher education institutions will have big training needs to be able to manage the new programme.
dO wE nEEd EraSMuS?
When student exchanges became saturated in the 2000s, Finnish higher educa- tion institutions started setting their eyes on income generating internationalisa- tion. Finnish students became more passive because a ”must-graduate-quick” system, counterproductive to mobility, was born as a side-effect of the degree re- form. A record number of students graduated from higher education institutions during that time, with a 100% pass rate. The system created a mass unemploy- ment and a flourishing continuing training sector. In reality, students and young people in general became internationally active, but not necessarily in the way envisaged by the international units of higher education institutions with their developers, directors and secretaries. It was increasingly cheaper to travel abroad and as their standard of living rose, more and more people travelled abroad dur- ing their holidays. Businesses became more international, too. It finally dawned on Finland that the values of the young generation had shifted from admiration of the turbo-capitalism to appreciation of global ethics.
It needs to be remembered, however, that we Finns are an isolated lot. The kind of cultural, linguistic and commercial cooperation that has existed for centuries between countries like Switzerland, Germany and France or Germany, the Neth- erlands and Belgium never took off between Finland’s neighbours (Yes, I can hear the uproar of a lot of Finns at reading the previous sentence, but the coun- ter arguments with reference to Stone Age migration and the making of Russian as the second official language in 2025 crucially miss the target.). We still need to work hard for internationalisation. For this reason, the opportunities provided by Erasmus and other EU programmes are so important to us.
In the wake of the new phase of EU education programmes, it is good to ask what we have benefited from the 40-year-old Erasmus. The programme went through its perhaps most severe crisis in the beginning of the 2010s when higher education became thoroughly commercialised. Support of exchanges with pub- lic money was regarded as reactionary and the directors of some companies that had moved their business to South America demanded that public funds should be used for more productive purposes. Finland and other Nordic countries in particular have managed to hold onto popular education and the ethical use of human resources by forming consortia and cooperating at home and abroad. The Erasmus programme adapted itself to the demands of the time and short exchanges of less than three months were funded. Their popularity showed that international exchanges were still alive and well, even if they had taken a differ- ent form.
When the European Coal and Steel Community was established in 1952, its purpose was to avoid a new world war on European soil. The idea was that if we agree on the use of the most important raw materials together, nobody will have a cause or a chance to take aggressive measures against the common good. There is a similar idea behind the free mobility of people: if people truly regard them- selves European, they don’t have the need to defend their nation aggressively – at least in theory.
Has Erasmus reduced the negative dependency of people on their national iden- tity? How much is it about individual characteristics and how much depends on social institutions and stakeholder groups that are formed by individuals? Is the nation state in the end just an extended stakeholder group? Once the Balkans was pacified as a result of the Kosovo agreement of 2021, it would appear that the European harmony has finally reached new levels. The Erasmus programme has certainly played its part in this. It will be important in the future for the same rea- sons as it was in the past. When I will be 70 years old in 2039 and ready to retire, I believe that Erasmus will be a world-wide programme and that the international base to be completed on the moon in five years’ time will host students with Erasmus scholarships.
theprogress ofinternationalcooperation in Finnish higher education has been tremendous in the past few decades. There are many reasons for this. It has been a national priority: the Finnish Ministry of Education has given the issue a lot of public support and international cooperation has been one of the crite- ria to receive performance-based funding for higher education institutions. The Ministry of Education has also set national strategies to increase cooperation with Russia and Asia and it has allocated higher education institutions project funding for diverse international objectives in its annual performance target negotiations with them. There have been other national measures to strengthen the interna- tional dimension of education, too: in 1991, the Centre for International Mobility CIMO was established.
Finland’s membership in the European Union in 1995 gave us clear programme structures and incentives for international cooperation, at least at European level. In addition, higher education institutions have established strong administrative support structures for international cooperation.
We have achieved a lot but challenges remain. Ulla Ekberg