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New ACA publication and seminar on the actual use of portable grants and loans for student mobility

Queenie K.H. Lam & Dansja Oste with Irina Ferencz and Bernd Wächter, Portable grants and loans: An overview and their contribution to outgoing student mobility. ACA Papers on International Cooperation in Education. Bonn: Lemmens, 2013. ISBN 978-3-86856-011-4.

The portability of state grants and loans is considered one of the key elements contributing to the realisation of a European area for lifelong learning. Its centrality at the European Union level is therefore not in doubt. However, not enough is known about the conditions attached to portable grants and loans and their actual use by mobile students. A new ACA publication – Portable grants and loans: An overview and their contribution to outgoing student mobility – seeks to fill this information gap.

Analysis in this book indicates that portable state grants and loans do possess enormous “potential” for supporting outgoing student mobility. Over 25 European countries have allowed such national funds to be used outside their national borders. Among them, some 15 countries reported that their state grants and/or loans can be used, in principle, for both outgoing credit and degree mobility, offering annually at least 1.65 million students the “opportunities” to use such financial aid to study abroad. For degree mobility alone, around 60 500 students took up such opportunities. This number represents a small fraction of all the beneficiaries of student aid in Europe, but covers a substantial share of mobile students in systems that are “open for all”.  

Published as a 144-page monograph in the ACA Papers series, the new book contains an overview of the student financial support schemes in 31 European countries and quantitative analysis of the use of portable grants/loans by European mobile students. It includes also short profiles of grant/loan schemes in 11 selected countries that have opened up their schemes, fully or partially, for outgoing student mobility.

In connection with the new publication and the STiME project, the 42nd ACA European Policy Seminar, entitled Funding student mobility: scholarships, grants and loans, will highlight the role portable grants and loans in supporting mobility. The seminar, to be held in Brussels on 10 April 2014, aims to attract 100 participants who are interested in issues related to funding mobility at institutional, national and European levels.  

The new publication is a direct outcome of the project State Grants and Loans as a Means to Increase Outgoing Mobility (STiME) carried out jointly by the Brussels-based Academic Cooperation Association (ACA) and Germany’s Deutsches Studentenwerk (DSW). The project was supported by the EU’s Lifelong Learning Programme (ERASMUS Accompanying Measures) for the period October 2012 to December 2013. 

To order your copy of the new ACA publication, please contact the publisher:

Lemmens Medien GmbH, Matthias-Grünewald-Str. 1-3, D-53175 Bonn, 
Tel.:  +49 (0)2 28/42 13 70
Fax: +49 (0)2 28/42 13 7-29
E-mail: info(at)lemmens.deonline via the publishers' website.

To register for the ACA European Policy Seminar, please click here.