On March 27th, the European Commission took a significant step forward by unveiling a blueprint for the European degree. This blueprint sets forth the framework and guidelines for the implementation of a European degree, marking a pivotal moment for European higher education institutions and students alike. Over the past year, the FOCI project, a dynamic partnership between YUFE, ECIU, and EPICUR Alliances, has been diligently working on piloting and testing this concept, its implications for the regulatory frameworks, criteria for awarding a European degree, and a future policy framework necessary to sustain it.
ITEM-report
As one of the key deliverables of the FOCI project, ITEM carried out a research “Analytical report on the procedural, organisational and legal aspects of awarding the European degree label’’ aiming to identify possibilities and obstacles for the European degree label arising from current national and institutional regulations. The research objective of this report was two-fold. First, this report took a comprehensive approach by evaluating the legal feasibility of the mandatory EDL criteria pursuant to the national regulatory frameworks and addressed the challenges that may arise in the creation of joint programmes. Secondly, this report explored three potential outcomes in which format the European degree label could be issued pursuant to the current regulatory framework: as a separate certificate issued to a student, a (quality) label in the joint diploma supplement presenting the jointness and European value of a programme or, as envisaged long-term by the European Commission, as a fully recognized qualification as a joint European degree. Next to the findings based on the regulatory framework, reflections were also made on the FOCI stakeholder analysis, on the desirability and additional value of such outcomes.
