Bologna: In the city that gave its name to the reforms that reshaped European higher education a generation ago, an older ambition is quietly being revived. The idea of a genuinely European university, one where a student might move seamlessly between campuses in three countries and graduate with a single jointly awarded diploma, has drifted in and out of fashion for decades. A fresh round of Erasmus+ funding suggests the Union is not ready to let it fade.
The European Universities initiative, launched to weld existing institutions into transnational alliances, has reached an awkward transitional moment. A new call for proposals, worth around 145 million euros, is designed less to break new ground than to keep the existing alliances alive with bridge funding until the Union’s next long-term budget takes effect. That framing is telling: the programme has grown popular enough that its main task now is survival between funding cycles rather than expansion, and the alliances it supports have become fixtures that governments and universities are reluctant to see wither.
What the alliances are reaching toward is the still-elusive European Degree, a qualification that would be recognised automatically across the continent without the tangle of national accreditation rules that currently makes joint programmes a bureaucratic ordeal. For students, the appeal is obvious: a degree that travels effortlessly across borders, earned through study in several countries, would embody the free movement that the Union promises in principle but often frustrates in the fine print. The current call also opens participation to institutions from the Western Balkans, extending the initiative’s reach toward countries still queuing for membership.
The obstacles are less romantic than the vision. Higher education remains jealously guarded as a national competence, and every member state maintains its own rules on accreditation, quality assurance, tuition and the legal status of degrees. Building a common qualification means persuading twenty-seven education ministries, and the universities beneath them, to cede a measure of control they have historically defended. Bridge funding keeps the alliances breathing, but it does not resolve the underlying question of whether governments genuinely want a European degree or merely like the idea of one.
There is also a quieter tension about purpose. Some see the alliances chiefly as engines of academic excellence and research collaboration, a way to pool talent and compete with the great universities of the United States and Asia. Others view them primarily as instruments of European identity, meant to produce graduates who think of the continent as a single space rather than a collection of separate systems. The two goals overlap comfortably much of the time, but they can pull in different directions when money is scarce and choices about specialisation have to be made.
For now, the funding buys time and continuity, which in the slow world of institutional reform is worth more than it sounds. The alliances endure, the Western Balkans edge closer to the European academic mainstream, and the dream of a diploma that means the same thing in one member state as in another survives to be argued over another day. Whether it ever becomes ordinary reality depends less on Erasmus budgets than on whether national capitals are finally willing to let a genuinely European qualification exist.
