The new EU-US agreement announced already in the March issue of the ACA Newsletter Education Europe has now officially been launched. On Wednesday 21^st June the two parties signed the new eight-year education agreement at the EU-US summit in Vienna. Commissioner Jan Figel described the agreement as a “stable, long term legal framework to (…) make (the EU’s and the US’s) higher education systems more open and competitive and to promote mutual understanding between (the EU and the US)”. The programme foresees the following actions:

• Joint Consortia Projects providing support to partnerships of EU and US institutions for the setting up of joint study programmes and mobility of students and staff;
• Excellence Mobility Projects, providing financial support for student mobility to joint consortia with a record of excellence in transatlantic cooperation;
• policy-oriented measures, addressing comparative higher education and vocational training issues;
• Schuman-Fulbright scholarship programme to highly qualified professionals for undertaking studies in the EU or the US in areas of relevance to EU-US relations.

The new EU-US agreement is different from its predecessor (which ran from 1995 to 2005) in that under this new programme the funded networks must offer recognised double or joint transatlantic degrees, which was not a requirement in the previous programme. The Commission plans to allocate 45 million Euro to the programme over the period 2006-2013, which is quite a considerable increase compared with the previous programme.