Baltic States’ step towards the establishment of the EHEA

On 8 June the Ministers of Education and Research of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania signed an agreement on automatic recognition of academic qualifications, which will allow students from the three countries going to any of the other Baltic States to have their degrees (academic, including doctoral, professional and upper secondary-school degrees) automatically recognised, without the intervention of the local ENIC-NARIC Centers.

Such an agreement can be seen as a joint effort of the Baltics towards a stronger EHEA the fulfillment of the Council’s conclusions of last 8 May on moving towards a vision of a European Education Area (EEA) and broaden the ‘common educational space’ to include schools. As clearly stated in the European Commission’s Communication of November 2017, it is another sign of the great importance attached to removing obstacles to the recognition of qualifications, both at the level of schools and higher education.

So far, a similar multi-country agreement had been only put in place by the Benelux countries, already in 2015: at the time, the agreement applied only to master’s and bachelor’s degrees, but it was strongly reinforced last January, when Benelux Ministers decided to expand the automatic recognition to associate degrees and doctoral degrees obtained in a Benelux country.

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