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ACA Papers: Portable State Grants and Loans. An overview and their contribution to outgoing student mobility

Queenie K.H. Lam, Danja Oste, with Irina Ferencz and Bernd Wächter. Bonn: Lemmens 2013. ISBN 978-3-86856-011-4

Portable state grants and loans 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”.

This publication contains an overview of the student financial support schemes in 31 European countries and much more on the quantitative aspect 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. It is the major outcome of an EU-funded project – STiME, carried out jointly by the Brussels-based Academic Cooperation Association (ACA) and Germany’s Deutsches Studentenwerk (DSW).