End of Erasmus in the United Kingdom: "It is the abandonment of the common European cultural base"

The United Kingdom wished to leave the European Erasmus university exchange program as part of its post-Brexit agreement concluded with the European Union last Thursday.

Invited from Europe 1 on Saturday, law professor Thomas Clay deplores "the abandonment" by the United Kingdom "of the common European cultural base".

INTERVIEW

Erasmus in the UK is well and truly over.

The country left the well-known European university exchange program for students as part of its post-Brexit deal reached with the EU on Thursday.

To justify this decision, about which the European negotiator, Michel Barnier, expressed his "regrets", the British Prime Minister notably invoked questions of costs.

However, he announced a global program to replace him.

Invited from Europe 1 on Saturday, the law professor at the Parisian Panthéon-Sorbonne University Thomas Clay deplores "the abandonment" by the United Kingdom "of the common European cultural base".

As a student, he had "been part of this first generation at the end of the 1980s which benefited from this Erasmus program". 

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"It will accentuate the detachment of the United Kingdom from the European continent"

The end of the program in the United Kingdom "will accentuate in the long term its detachment from the European continent to go, perhaps, to drift a little more across the Atlantic", regrets the academic.

For him, the British decision is "a great sadness" in particular for this country but also for Europe, because "there is no better way to build Europe" than through "this immersion in a another country for a semester or a year ".

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Thanks to Erasmus, he reports, his generation "was able to realize very quickly what Europe was, Europe under construction, what students from other countries were".

And the national replacement program announced by Boris Johnson, named Alan Turing, named after this famous British mathematician, will probably not make it possible to maintain the same volume of exchanges.

For the moment, "you pay your registration fees at your normal university. In France, the registration fees for a bachelor's year are 170 euros per year. Erasmus allows you to pay your registration fees at your French university spending six months or a year in England, ”explains Thomas Clay.

"With the discontinuation of the program, you will pay the English registration fee, in the order of 10,000 euros per year, which is between 50 and 100 times more than what you pay today."

For the professor, the British choice is therefore not only a "very bad decision for European students", but also "for English students who will no longer be accommodated in these conditions in European universities".