Erasmus+ is best known for enabling students and youth to study, train, and gain international mobility experience. Since 2014, Erasmus+ Cooperation Partnerships, formerly known as Strategic Partnerships, have become an integral part of the programme. These projects have played a fundamental role in accelerating and consolidating bottom-up cooperation in higher education. By allowing higher education institutions to engage in more advanced bottom-up driven partnerships, they contribute to advancing internationalisation within their institutions while improving the quality of their student and staff mobility programmes. In spite of the tremendous impact this action has had on deepening ties among European higher education institutions, there is a worrying trend of decreasing funding to support this cooperation.
To quote the Erasmus+ programme guide in 2025, the ambition is clear: ”The primary goal of Cooperation Partnerships is to allow organisations to increase the quality and relevance of their activities, to develop and reinforce their networks of partners, to increase their capacity to operate jointly at transnational level, boosting internationalisation of their activities and through exchanging or developing new practices and methods as well as sharing and confronting ideas”. Among the members of the EUF, there is an overwhelming consensus that this funding line still serves an invaluable objective. Even more so, the projects this funding line has supported have met, and at times exceeded, the set objectives and specific priorities by achieving systemic impact across the entire European Education Area.
Such bottom-up projects not only fulfil an important role in bringing higher educational institutions together, but they also advance and cement international cooperation while promoting European values. By building trust and mutual knowledge among these institutions, they contribute to making the European Education Area more interconnected. With the introduction of this funding line in 2014, higher education institutions have begun developing EU project units in the field of education, enhancing cooperation, and developing strategic internationalisation initiatives in line with the programme’s objectives and their own internationalisation strategies.
The intangible benefits are profound: enabling academic and administrative colleagues to engage in EU projects, previously reserved for the best-performing researchers under Horizon Europe, to meet and develop joint initiatives in all areas and sectors. This has had transformative benefits both for the individuals who took part in these initiatives and the institutions that started having a more internationally oriented outline of their education programmes, which were previously limited to traditional student and staff mobility. This transformation is fully aligned with the most recent communications from both the European Commission and the European Council, aiming to deepen the ties between European higher education institutions and create a more integrated European Education Area.
Furthermore, projects funded by the Cooperation Partnerships must be aligned with the European transversal priorities of Erasmus, namely: inclusion and diversity, digital transformation, environmental protection and combatting climate change, as well as participation in democratic life and civic engagement. Every priority area has been covered by these projects. While comprehensive evaluation reports of the current programming period have not yet produced a holistic yet objective measurement of the impact of Cooperation Partnerships a few examples from the portfolio of projects where the European University Foundation has been involved help demonstrate their outcomes in a tangible way:
- Supporting doctoral mobility in Erasmus+: the DocMob project, funded through the French National Agency, has allowed us to gain insights into the institutional barriers to doctoral student mobility and made concrete recommendations for the inclusion of doctoral students in Erasmus+ by 2021, which informed the evolution of Erasmus+ in this regard.
- Striving for more inclusion among students: financial obstacles have consistently been among the top deterrents in student participation in mobility opportunities. Erasmus For All (funded by the Portuguese National Agency) developed a new grant calculation methodology accounting for city-level costs that would allow more students to deem mobility opportunities as affordable and accessible; it’s proposals have met with widespread support from among European University Alliances, which would stand to benefit from an improved mobility grant calculation. Erasmus Gap (funded by the French National Agency) pivots this idea a step further by focusing on identifying the differences between mobile and non-mobile student cohorts. Mapping the existing discrepancies will allow to tailor the support mechanisms further, closing the gap in student mobility opportunities.
- Digitalising Learning Agreements for students: we developed a prototype of the Online Learning Agreement in 2014, which led to several Cooperation Partnership projects (funded by the Luxembourg National Agency) that allowed testing and further development of the tool. The tool became a key building block of Erasmus Without Paper and catalysed a broader digital transformation process that later on became known as the ‘European Student Card Initiative’, drastically simplifying a cumbersome process. The tool remains a part of a digital infrastructure serving hundreds of thousands of students every year.
- Embedding mobility in curricula: making mobility the norm rather than the exception has been the objective of the NORM project (funded by the German National Agency). NORM has been inspirational for HEIs to induce changes in their internationlisation efforts, notably by introducing mandatory mobility windows or course equivalence tables for their Erasmus+ Inter-Institutional Agreements. More specifically, the project released a European Curricula Design guide and developed a course matching tool.
- Supporting mental well-being of students: in line with the European Commission guidelines and rising concerns from the higher education community about decreasing well-being among students in particular during and in the post-covid era, the WISE project (funded by the French National Agency) focused on mapping mental well-being support structures, while the more recent Mobile Mind in Motion (funded by the Romanian National Agency) project focuses more specifically on support measures for mobile students.
- Supporting Continuous Professional Development of higher education staff in the field of internationalisation: for institutions with ambitious internationalisation goals, integrating internationalisation into the fabric of their institution is a major challenge. While the BEST+ project (funded by the Spanish National Agency) pioneered blended staff training opportunities that have since become mainstreamed through the Blended Intensive Programmes, the FESC project (funded by the German National Agency) shifted focus towards a competence framework for International Relations staff members of higher education institutions. As a further note, the Teaching with Erasmus+ project (funded by the Hungarian National Agency) has looked into establishing quality standards and guidelines for teaching mobility, as a cornerstone to internationalise curricula.
- Supporting the green transition: Uniting sustainability and internationalisation, the Green Erasmus project (funded by the Walloon National Agency in Belgium) has focused on embedding sustainability through a set of guidelines and project recommendations to increase green travel grants and the number of eligible days for green travel in the Erasmus+ programme. By the same token, the Erasmus Goes Green project (funded by the French National Agency) developed guidelines for sustainable internationalisation strategies and a carbon footprint calculator. While these projects transformed how International Relation Offices view the green transition in their field of work, this also laid the groundwork for a follow-up project called Sustainable Erasmus Travel (funded by the European Agency) addressing the competences developed by students when traveling green and running a large scale campaign towards students to nudge them to adopt greener behaviors before, during and after a mobility.
- Facing the housing crisis for mobile students: students consistently cite housing as a major concern and obstacle to student mobility. The HOME projects (first funded by the Dutch and then by the Italian National Agencies) have been addressing this challenge by developing quality labels and bringing housing platforms together to offer a comprehensive solution to students. As a result, the housing collector developed through the projects centralises thousands of housing offers from different platforms in one single location: the Erasmus+ mobile App of the European Commission.
- Striving to digitalise the course catalogues: a major obstacle to integrated transnational cooperation in education is the scattered availability of the course catalogue data. In an ever more digitalised world, the work pioneered by the EUF in the context of NORM (presented above) resulted in the creation of the Open Course Catalogue API (OCCAPI), which is now set to become part of the Erasmus Without Paper Course API. Similarly, the creation of the ongoing DACEM project (funded by the Spanish National Agency) is developing a course catalogue management system that will be made available in a cloud version and as an open source software for higher education institutions in 2025/26.
What punch do the KA2+ projects pack? The transnational nature of these projects, responding to key trends from sustainability, inclusion, digitalisation and more, underscores the importance of collaboration and innovation. By bringing together partners across Europe, KA2+ projects foster mutual learning, knowledge exchange, opportunities for professional development and an increased sense of European identity. Taken together, Cooperation Partnerships have the ability to drive systemic change in European Higher Education. Beyond improving European education quality, the results of these projects demonstrate improved institutional capacity, willingness to cooperate in more key areas, and informed strategic decision-making to generate impact at the local, national and European levels.
All things considered, Erasmus+ Cooperation Partnerships present a significant opportunity for transformative change at the individual and institutional levels. Despite their relatively modest scale, these projects have the potential to reach thousands of institutions and staff, ultimately benefitting hundreds of thousands of students. With minimal funding requirements, we can achieve greater inclusivity and accessibility, ensuring that international educational advancements are within reach for a diverse population. This approach not only adapts to current educational needs but also sets a foundation for long-term resilience in higher education institutions.
To fully realise the potential of Cooperation Partnerships, it is essential that European decision-makers exercise foresight in the allocation of funding. In an era where resilience is paramount, it is essential to prioritise investments that foster sustainable educational growth. By strategically directing financial resources toward initiatives that drive transformation and inclusivity, we can collectively fortify the future of higher education and contribute to a more just, prosperous, and equitable society. Although seen from an institutional perspective as engines of innovation, these partnerships serve as vital links for developing a shared European identity, promoting EU values, and building long-term networks that strengthen solidarity across borders. It is imperative that we seize this opportunity to empower institutions, staff, and students, enabling them to have the opportunity to prosper in a rapidly changing world, one increasingly shaped by shifting geopolitical realities.
© Image by Krystian Szczęsny