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Fostering Europe’s attractiveness to global students and academics

How to continue making Europe more attractive to international students and researchers? This question was high on ACA’s agenda in October as part of the activities carried out under the Study in Europe and UniWeliS projects.

Efforts focused on raising Europe’s visibility as an attractive destination for international students included forward-looking discussions between the Study in Europe consortium members – Campus France, DAAD, Nuffic, HARNO and ACA – who were welcomed in Paris by Campus France Director General, Donatienne Hissard. The partners of this project funded by the European Commission and coordinated by Campus France brainstormed about the future of their ongoing marketing and promotional work, building on the lessons learnt in the current stage of the initiative, and taking into account changes in promotion practices sparked by the pandemic and the volatile geopolitical context.  


Photo by Campus France

Aiming to support Europe’s attractiveness to international academics, the UniWeliS project partners led by SAIA have designed and delivered a comprehensive training programme for higher education managers responsible for academic mobility and professional staff offering assistance to incoming PhD students, lecturers, and researchers from the UniWeliS partner countries (Bulgaria, Poland, Serbia and Slovakia). Pilot tested at Sofia University in early October, the training programme consisted of six modules looking at

  • Strategic and practical considerations for setting an institutional welcome centre
  • Pursuing a comprehensive approach to welcome services
  • Building local partnerships to offer quality support services to international academics
  • Developing intercultural communication skills
  • Setting up a digital welcome centre
  • Enhancing the institutional global profile and visibility

Based on its longstanding experience in the field of international higher education marketing, ACA has designed the global profile training module to enhance the knowledge of strategic approaches and solutions to building an institution’s attractiveness for global talent. The training included two parts dedicated to the key steps in building a global profile and visibility from a broader institutional perspective and the main approaches to international talent attraction.

The training manual and support materials will be available to other interested higher institutions by end of 2022, so that they can implement the professional development programme designed by the UniWeliS project internally.

Stay tuned for our project updates.