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Rencontres européennes de l’enseignement supérieur¹ European meetings on higher education - Speech by Mme Valérie Pécresse, Minister for Higher Education and Research (excerpts)

Paris, Bordeaux, 18 October 2007

(...) We have to do even better for our students. Because, as everyone knows, a long stay abroad must become the norm for our students. I hope that eventually all students can have a period of study outside our country. And I mean all our young people, not just those with the means to do so. This is why, with all our European Union and European Commission partners, I want to explore the ways we can develop youth mobility in Europe still further. First way: strengthen and promote the teaching of foreign languages on all higher education courses - this is, of course, a condition for openness to the world, but also the prerequisite for substantially increasing international mobility. Second way: offer genuine incentive grants by combining complementary EU, national and local funding in a single bursary, presented as such. With this aim in view, I have called for the doubling from 2008 of the number of State international mobility bursaries from 15,000 to 30,000, which from then on will be available to all students whose parents’ income is below the tax threshold. They will increase to €400 a month and can be combined with other grants allocated on social criteria. Third way: put greater emphasis on the existing programmes, to attract more and more foreign students: in a few years, France has gone from first to third place for the number of European Erasmus students, behind Germany and Spain. I don’t need to tell you that this is a development we can’t accept without reacting. So I’d like the French European Union Presidency in the second half of 2008 to consider student mobility one of the engines for building a knowledge-based European economy. For me, the French presidency must really provide the opportunity for encouraging student mobility within Europe and towards Europe. We need to devise the tools for tomorrow’s mobility, not only make mobility a more integral part of training paths, but also make our higher education more attractive to foreign students. (...)./. ¹ Meetings organized every two years by the Europe-Education-Formation-France agency.