Brussels: In the second week of June, students from across the continent gathered at the University of Genoa to spend five days reimagining how a port city stewards its cultural heritage. The Entre Camp, co-funded by Erasmus+ and run through the Ulysseus alliance of universities, is the kind of event that rarely makes headlines yet captures where European education policy is heading: away from one-off exchanges and toward dense, permanent networks of institutions that behave, increasingly, as a single campus spread across borders.
That direction is backed by serious money. The Erasmus+ call for 2026 carries a budget of roughly 5.2 billion euros, enough to fund learning-mobility experiences for around 1,275,000 participants and to support more than 100,000 organisations, from universities and schools to vocational centres, youth groups and sports clubs. The headline figure is familiar, but the structure underneath it is changing. The European Universities initiative has now selected 73 transnational alliances, Ulysseus among them, linking institutions that pool courses, research and student services. The Commission frames these alliances as the backbone of a European strategy for universities; critics ask whether spreading funds across so many partnerships dilutes their impact.
The 2026 programme also introduces a new action aimed at the school sector, intended to widen partnerships and mobility below university level and to test teaching methods that build basic skills. Running through the design is an explicit civic ambition. Erasmus is being asked not only to improve employability but to reinforce democratic participation and shared values at a time when both feel less assured than they once did. Mobility, in this telling, is soft power turned inward, a way of binding a generation of Europeans to one another before politics pulls them apart.
The heritage focus on display in Genoa connects to a quieter strand of EU cultural policy. The European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage, a digital infrastructure meant to link museums, archives and conservation professionals, is designed to let smaller institutions work with digitised collections they could never afford to manage alone. Horizon Europe has dedicated billions to research on cultural heritage and the creative industries, on the argument that culture is not a luxury line item but an economic sector and a source of cohesion.
The scepticism is worth taking seriously. Erasmus remains, for all its reach, a programme whose benefits flow disproportionately to students already mobile and well-resourced, and widening access has proved stubbornly hard. The alliances are young, and whether they deliver genuine integration or merely add administrative scaffolding will not be clear for years. The whole edifice also sits under the shadow of the next multiannual budget negotiation, where education must compete with defence, migration and industrial policy for a shrinking share.
For the students who left Genoa in mid-June with a heritage project and contacts in half a dozen countries, those debates are remote. The value of the programme, its defenders argue, is that it is felt before it is measured. Whether Europe can afford to keep funding it at scale is a question for the budget rooms, not the lecture halls.
