On 22 January 2009, the Institute of International Education (IIE) together with the Freie Universität Berlin released a report on "Joint and Double Degree Programs in the Transatlantic Context". The report examines the current landscape of transatlantic degree programs and identifies the intrinsic challenges as well as the opportunities for expanding the existing programmes or for developing new ones. The publication is the result of an extensive survey conducted in spring 2008, based on responses from 180 higher education institutions, both in the US and the European Union.

The main finding of the report is that, although universities on both sides of the Atlantic are working to establish more international joint and double degree programmes in order to better internationalise their campuses, participation in and support for such initiatives varies considerably among institutions and countries. More concretely, the study shows that European campuses offer twice as many collaborative degrees at the moment, and that, in general, European students are more likely to participate than their US counterparts.

Both the survey and report are part of a larger project funded by the EU-US Atlantis Program, jointly administered and funded by the US Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) and the European Commission's Directorate General for Education and Culture.

The report is available for download on the IIE website.

IIE