Erasmus+ may be one of the EU’s most loved programmes, but its success is starting to stretch its budget. As more students want to take part and living costs rise, universities warn that the Erasmus+ funding proposed for the next EU long-term budget may not go far enough. Joachim Wyssling of the European University Foundation told EESC Info what this could mean in practice: smaller grants, heavier paperwork and fewer opportunities for those who need support most.

Erasmus+ is often described as the most tangible way young people experience Europe, yet recent discussions highlight a disconnect between its popularity and its current funding reality. With the next MFF negotiations underway, how would you characterise the current state of the higher education sector in the EU?

Higher education in the EU is in a paradoxical position: it is central, socially popular and strategically important, but still under-resourced relative to both its mission and the expectations placed on it. Erasmus+ remains one of Europe’s most visible and valued programmes, with more than half a million students participating each year, yet the current funding debate shows that demand is growing faster than the financial envelope.

That gap matters because, when engaging in Erasmus+, universities are being asked to deliver on multiple fronts at once: mobility, inclusion, skills, digital transition, green transition, international cooperation and support for democratic resilience. The Commission’s current proposal is important because it preserves the programme’s scale in nominal terms. Yet the real concern is whether it can sustain the sector’s ambitions once inflation, new actions, rising participation, the Commission’s own mobility target of 23% by 2030 and the further development of the European University Alliances are taken into account.

In that sense, the sector is not in crisis, but it is under pressure. The real risk is gradual erosion: more objectives, more complexity and more expectations, without a corresponding increase in the resources needed to deliver them well.

The EUF has released a set of recommendations for the 2028-2034 period, including major structural changes like extending interinstitutional agreements to cut administrative red tape and introducing city-level cost-of-living adjustments for grants. Beyond just increasing the budget, how do these specific reforms change the experience of Erasmus+ for students and universities?

The EUF’s recommendations are not just technical fixes; they are changes that would make Erasmus+ fairer, less bureaucratic and more accessible in everyday practice. Extending interinstitutional agreements would reduce recurring administrative work to avoid repeatedly restarting the same paperwork. We argue that this could save hundreds of thousands of hours and let institutions focus more on quality and less on bureaucracy.

City-level cost-of-living adjustments would have an equally practical impact on students. Today, a grant based solely on broad country categories can leave students under-supported in expensive cities; a city-based model would better align grants with actual living costs. This would be a giant step towards improving inclusion in a targeted and effective way.

Taken together, these reforms would change Erasmus+ from a programme that is merely available into one that is genuinely workable for a wider range of students and universities. In other words, they not only improve administration; they improve access, predictability and trust in the programme. 

The European Commission has proposed a EUR 41 billion budget for Erasmus+, which represents a 50% nominal increase. However, your analysis suggests that, once you account for inflation, the addition of new actions and rising participation, the real purchasing power might not increase at all. If the current proposal is effectively a ‘status quo’ budget in real terms, what are the immediate risks for the sector?

If the proposed budget ends up being ‘status quo’ in real terms, the first risk is that Erasmus+ will quietly stop matching its own political ambition. The Commission’s proposal is around EUR 40.8 billion, a nominal rise of about 50%, but we, together with stakeholders from the higher education sector, argue that inflation, expanded programme scope and rising participation will absorb much of that increase.

The immediate consequence would be pressure on mobility volumes and on inclusion measures. If more actions are added without a genuine increase in budget, something has to give: grant levels, the number of participants, institutional support, bottom-up cooperation or excellence initiatives like the European University Alliances. In practice, that means fewer students benefiting, tighter competition and a higher chance that participation remains easier for those already well-resourced – a reality both at the individual level for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and at the institutional level for smaller higher education institutions.

For universities, a status quo real budget also means instability. They are expected to deliver more transnational cooperation, more integrated digital systems and stronger inclusion support, but with resources that do not keep pace with the cost of delivery. That creates administrative strain and limits the programme’s ability to meaningfully expand access.

If you could make one definitive recommendation to the negotiators in the European Parliament and the Council to ensure the next MFF truly secures the future of European higher education, what would it be?

Our single recommendation would be this: lock in a budget and allocation model that protects the real value of Erasmus+ and the higher education share, rather than relying on a nominal increase that looks larger on paper than it is in practice. That means negotiators should restore the sector’s budget share to a level that reflects the programme’s central role in European higher education and mobility, and index the envelope to actual needs rather than to political symbolism.

If I had to make it even more concrete, I would say: preserve ambition by matching funding to participation, inflation and programme scope, and by ring-fencing the higher education pillar so that mobility and cooperation are not crowded out by new priorities. Without that, the EU risks keeping Erasmus+ popular but less effective, which would be a strategic loss for the European Education Area and for Europe’s social cohesion.

Joachim Wyssling serves as Deputy Executive Manager of the European University Foundation (EUF) and has expertise in the internationalisation of higher education, international student mobility, the digital transformation of higher education and the management of large-scale, multicultural EU-funded projects. He has coordinated numerous initiatives funded under the Erasmus+, Horizon Europe and Connecting Europe Facility EU funding programmes. Historically, Joachim has co-founded the French branch of the Erasmus Student Network (ESN) and served as the Vice-President of ESN International.