RWTH involved in new ERASMUS+ Funding for ENHANCE
The EU Commission has announced that 65 alliances consisting of 500 institutions from across Europe will receive total funding of €402.2 million over the next four years. The support serves to strengthen existing partnerships or establish new ones. Also among the successful alliances is ENHANCE, in which RWTH Aachen University has been involved since its inception. ENHANCE will receive funding of 14.4 million euros from 2023 to 2027.
ENHANCE has already received funding from the European Universities Initiative within the European ERASMUS+ program since 2020. While the alliance consisted of seven partner universities back then, the current application was submitted along with three new partners: ETH Zurich, TU Delft, and Gdansk Tech. ENHANCE thus benefits from the goal of the call to further deepen, intensify, and make more effective existing institutional partnerships in the European University Alliances to keep advancing the long-term vision of a European University. Integrating the three new partner universities as full members further strengthens the alliance.
European universities are a flagship initiative of the European Commission’s European Higher Education Strategy. Based on fundamental European values, they jointly strive for excellence and sustainability in shaping the higher education system and develop long-term, strategic forms of cooperation, for example in a joint teaching strategy for innovative and international teaching formats or a common “inter-university campus.”
Ute Habel, Vice-Rector for International Affairs at RWTH, is delighted with the positive result: “It is wonderful and very important news for us and our network that the European Commission will fund ENHANCE for another four years. The approval of our application in the second funding phase allows us to continue the work of the past three years. The successful outcome shows that with the pilot project, we are setting the right course on the way to becoming a European university. We can now only grow closer together as a network and further develop our goals together with now ten leading universities of technology from all over Europe and then effectively promote and consolidate them. The Vice Rector further explains: “ENHANCE is based on common European values, promotes student exchange in Europe, and remains an important internationalization tool that brings together the strengths and diversity of European teaching and research with the potential to shape our universities of technology in the long term.”
ENHANCE has set ambitious goals for the next four years: ENHANCE One Campus is to help break down administrative barriers to grant students and researchers unlimited mobility between the various partner universities, thus facilitating exchange visits between the institutions. The joint teaching strategy is to be further developed. To this end, course offerings and formats of lifelong learning will be further developed using a challenge-based approach. Students should be able to make uncomplicated use of mobility opportunities in ENHANCE and benefit from the available international academic content.
The alliance also aims to help further strengthen the links between teaching, research, and innovation. Students will be offered easy access to European research networks and innovation ecosystems through ENHANCE. Information-sharing between science and society is to be further strengthened by ENHANCE in order to be able to meet future societal challenges in a solution-oriented manner.
The ENHANCE Alliance was founded in 2019 under the coordination of TU Berlin to create a joint European university network free of administrative or academic barriers. Together, the ENHANCE partner institutions aim to drive responsible social change based on science and technology. Besides RWTH Aachen University, the partner institutions of the alliance are: Technische Universität Berlin – serving as speaker, Chalmers University of Technology (Chalmers), Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Polytechnic University of Milan (Polimi), Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), and Warsaw University of Technology (WUT). In March 2022, the National Technical University of Ukraine in Kyiv and the National Polytechnic University of Lviv, also in Ukraine, became partners in the alliance. In November 2022, TU Delft University of Technology, Gdańsk University of Technology, and ETH Zurich were welcomed as additional associated partners.