A new programme is set to help fund students from outside the European Union who want to study here. Is it a great opportunity for foreign scholars or just a contribution to the brain drain?

Starting in 2004, students and scholars from third countries wishing to study or perform research within European Union countries will find that task much easier under a recent proposal from the European Commission. Students could receive up to EUR 1,600 per month, and scholars an average of EUR 13,000 per year for teaching and research assignments. Due to complement the existing Erasmus Programme, the new Erasmus World project will provide over 4,000 students and 1,000 scholars the opportunity to work and study in the EU on existing and newly designed 'EU Masters Courses' during the four-year start-up period of the programme. "Europe is becoming an increasing and more coherent player in world affairs, both political and economic," says Mike Ungersma, a US citizen and lecturer in journalism and director of development for the School of Journalism at Cardiff University in Wales. "Young people from outside the Community need to know more about how it works, especially as the Community is about to expand dramatically. "This initiative from the Commission is most welcome and could go a long way to helping other nations understand the dynamics of European unity and expansion." A personal story In 2001, I studied in a MA programme in European Journalism through Cardiff University in Wales in partnership with Hogeschool Van Utrecht in the Netherlands and Journalistiek Hogeschool in Arhus, Denmark. For the first three months of the programme 16 other students and myself studied in Utrecht, then spent three months in Arhus, with the rest of the course taken in Cardiff. It was a great opportunity for me to learn how Europe and the EU works politically, historically and economically. However, as an American student I had to pay about three times more for the studies than did my European counterparts. Finding student loan funding in the US for study abroad in MA courses was nearly impossible. The six Africans on the course received scholarships mainly from former ruling countries like the UK, and rightly so. I was interested in working in Europe after the course and have reached that goal, working as a freelance writer in Brussels for the last eight months. Without the MA, this would not have been possible. But thinking back, after seeing this new proposal by the EU Commission, I wish I could have waited a few more years. Receiving EUR 1,600 per month to study in the EU would have been more than enough. Addressing the brain drain? Rebecca Farley, an American-Australian dual citizen completing a PhD at Cardiff University thinks the new Erasmus World proposals do not go far enough and do not adequately address the issue of 'brain drain' from countries outside the EU, especially third-world countries which often see their best and brightest migrate to higher wages and better standards of living in the West after studying in programmes here. "What seems to me to be more important and more useful would be to get Europeans OUT of Europe, get them to go to places like Indonesia, Africa, South America, Australasia to study, and hell, maybe to work there for a few years afterwards," says Farley, who is also Book Reviews Editor Intensities: the Online Journal of Cult Media. "At the moment Europeans pretty much only spend time in those kind of places as tourists, missionaries or militaries. Seems to me there can't be any moves towards equity unless it's a two-way movement. People should be going to those places, instead of always automatically assuming that non-Europeans all want to leave their own countries, or that European universities are somehow better." According to Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for education, there is a deficit of students and scholars studying in the EU from third countries and three quarters of those 400,000 students are concentrated in just a few countries. The new initiative, she says, will enable more universities in all member states to take part in the project. By 2008, she hopes to see 250 new inter-university masters courses created. An "EU seal of approval" would be given to these courses which would have to involve at least three universities from three different member states, giving visiting students the chance to study in a number of countries. August 2002