Britain turned down the offer to remain a member of the cultural exchange program after Brexit.
The U.K. decided to leave the EU’s Erasmus+ student exchange scheme because Brits’ poor foreign language skills made membership too expensive to justify, a senior British official has revealed.
Lower take-up of the scheme by British students compared to other nationalities — put down to a weak aptitude for language learning — meant London expected to pay in nearly €300 million more a year than it received back, Nick Leake, a veteran senior diplomat at the U.K. Mission said this week.
It comes as youth organizations on both sides of the channel launch a renewed push for the U.K. to rejoin the scheme — and as an EU advisory body urges the Commission to get negotiations going.
Erasmus = student exchange between universities.
If you end up hosting other people’s students but nobody else hosts yours, then you end up spending more on education.
According to the article UK students are less likely to go overseas because they can’t speak any of the languages.
It’s a bit like if you kept having your kids’ friends over to dinner but your own kids were too picky to ever eat dinner at their friends’ houses.
That makes sense, thanks!
So do the government fully pay for the students they host? Or is it a subsidised thing?
I think most likely governments pay into Erasmus and then individual universities get fees reimbursed. The appeal of it for students is you don’t pay international fees.
Makes sense in that context