I’m convinced that the Erasmus programme (and it’s not so serious counterparts such as AEGEE and IAESTE) contribute to lasting peace in Europe by marrying people between nations.
a few decades ago flying in Europe was stupidly expensive, and mostly done by national companies. It was for managers or expensive once-a-year vacations. The concept of a weekend getaway did not exist
Ryanair was the first company in Europe to be massively successful offering low cost international flights (being allowed by new regulations) and drastically changed the market.
Erasmus was awesome. I remember getting a card as a lone American in Dresden.
One difference I recall was that being a university student in Germany felt like a super-power compared to my time in the U.S. Everything seemed less expensive, subsidized travel and housing, lots of events hosted for you to meet people…
When I was a digital nomad I enjoyed meeting folks from Europe everywhere I went that were on Erasmus. They always had created a little pocket of community and were welcoming to strangers.
Former ESNer here.
The Erasmus Student Network is a volunteer-run organization in 100+ Cities all over Europe. It works like this:
You go on Erasmus to a foreign city and you find an ESN chapter there. Among other things, the ESN people there will organize events for you to participate in, help you get a mobile phone SIM card, a bank account and organize parties to mix Erasmus students with local students.
In my city I organized movie nights inside of the university and showed Austrian movies with english subtitles (e.g. Wolf Haas movies or "Muttertag") so foreign exchange students could learn about Austria and Austrian humour. There was a welcome party at the beginning of every semester in a big club with 600+ people and a goodbye party at the end of every semester. In between there were movie nights, museum vists, skiing trips, wine road trips, city tours, pub crawls and lots of other stuff to do and get to know Graz and Austria.
All of this is organized by volunteers (ESN members) who do this in their free time. There are city chapters of ESN (ESN Graz, ESN Vienna etc.) and above them a country chapter (ESN Austria). ESN Austria is a platform where all the volunteers meet and exchange information and ideas and talk about what works and what doesn't for our students. ESN Austria organized a skiing trip every year where they booked whole hotel and hundreds of Erasmus students from all over Austria could go there and try out skiing for a few days. Participating was cheap for the Erasmus students because ESN people got sponsors on board (e.g. free Red Bull and lots of other stuff). ESN Austria also had a cooperation with an Austrian telco and if you were an Erasmus students and you come to our office during our office hours, we give you a free sim card and a cheap bank account. The telco and the bank would pay us a few € for every activated sim card and every opened bank account and since ESN is a non-profit that money would go right back to the students (e.g. subsidized museum trips and other cultural events). It's really a win-win-win situation for everyone.
I was never on Erasmus but I was a volunteer for ESN both in my hometown and in our national chapter and due to this I got to know lots of amazing people, both volunteers and students, learned a lot, had a lot of fund and acquired a few skills that would turn out to be quite useful in my later life.
Erasmus is a common word in european language, meaning "exchange". Imagine you live in Paris, you're a French person, you will probably "go on an erasmus" during your studies. You will study abroad during one semester, in Berlin for example.
In Europe, we also say "erasmus" for people who went abroad, outside the EU (USA for example). It's harder to go on an exchange in the USA as you have to translate your grades, everything is more expensive (no european health insurance, etc).
In Sweden, we only use that word to talk about exchange studies within that program. If someone mentions Erasmus, I would never, before reading your comment, even consider they might mean going to the USA.
Not to disqualify your experience, it might very well be used like that in your country or language. I just thought it was a bit interesting.
I didn't do Erasmus, but I won a similar exchange program that brought me from the University of Granada to UC Irvine, where I met my now wife. Life changing experience.
The problem is that US universities charge exorbitant fees, and that creates a problem for exchange programs with (continental) European universities. American universities are mostly unwilling to waive fees for European students who are used to not paying any significant fees, and European universities are not going to pay for it on behalf of the students.
There's the Fulbright program with bilateral exchanges with many countries. According to wikipedia.de, on average each German university or college sends 55 students in a year to the US with a Fullbright scholarship.
Top comments are in line with a movie I saw where all the kids were in Erasmus and it seemed like the ideal way to hook up/connect with potential lovers one might not have connected with in any other context.
I lived abroad for a while. So I wasn't the right demographic for Erasmus being American. But I made so many friends who were participants. I ended meeting them at the same bars and cafes. Where students and just graduated, former students would meet and hangup.
I didn't get to do any exchange programs just 4 years of my nose to grindstone. And I feel like I really missed out and messed up.
How in the world is it legal for that dataset to be freely available for anyone to download when it clearly contains uniquely identifiable personal information?
I can literally identify multiple people!
Why hasn't this data at the very least been aggregated in such a way that any random idiot like me can't just take a quick look and identify at least 2 people in less than 5 minutes?
How is this in line with GDPR? Certainly the exceptions for statistics don't totally eliminate the requirement for them to minimize the data collection and publication to only fulfill the requirements.
What legal basis do they have to make personal information of thousands of people freely available with no anonymization at all?
What public benefit is there in making public the data for specific people, instead of non-uniquely identifiable buckets of people?
Some universities have very low number of students going to other specific universities.
Based on that alone I now know the unique ID of the people who went, and subsequently their start and end date, their gender, the courses they took, etc... Data that I would otherwise not know about them.
This isn't a theoretical risk either, i legitimately identified someone else, and learned information I did no know about them from that dataset.
Now we're friends and I'm sure they wouldn't mind me knowing what I learned, but it's nonetheless a violation.
> Based on that alone I now know the unique ID of the people who went
What unique ID do you mean? I can't find any unique ID type of column in any of the files published.
> the courses they took
In what file can you see the list of courses they took? I don't think it's shared anywhere.
> and subsequently their start and end date, their gender
> now we're friends and I'm sure they wouldn't mind me knowing what I learned
You're friends and you just learned their gender? Sorry to be nitpicking like this. You had known their gender previously and that helped you identify them in the dataset, not the other way round?
I don't think you are. I'm guessing that for an institution with a small number of people on the Erasmus program you can match people by gender/approximate age/start date to someone in the Erasmus data and hence what, when and where they studied on their Erasmus year.
This looks like information that would be on LinkedIn. I'm not sure many people would find this to be an invasion of privacy and isn't covered by the the GDPR
How is that an excuse? GDPR doesn't make that distinction.
The fact is I learned new personal information about someone else from this dataset. The fact that I already had some information about that person is no excuse.
What could you possible learn from the map you didn't already know before? The time they went and if they taught their native language their and similar stuff. Yeah, okay i see your point.
All of those things are personal information subject to GDPR. I would certainly get in trouble if I collected information on the location of specific people and made it available, why don't they?
The map doesn't seem to work for me. What's the identifiable data like? Are there names? From the article it seemed it's just publicly-available city-to-city connection data.
I studied in the Netherlands as Czech Erasmus student about 12 years ago and I recall that one had to fill out a questionnaire about their experience and study during the exchange, and that the results were public for anyone to see[1], which included information about home and receiving institution, courses and so on. And people often consulted this database before submitting an application for their stay, so I would not say that they didn't know about it.
And while it's likely that local legal conditions differs a bit and that it changed over time, I'm not surprised that such high level data are public.
Meh, I didn't qualify as a STEM student. Meantime all female colleagues studying "Spanish" and "Italian" had parties and sex of their lives in Valencia, Granada, Milan, Barcelona, Sicily, and others. For me the Erasums could be shut down. Don't even remember me this program.
Hm, the technical university I studied at (in a STEM program) has dozens of Erasmus partner universities, including programs in Sevilla, Milan, Istanbul and of course Barcelona. Erasmus is definitely open to all fields - maybe your university just had a bad international office?
