ENHANCE to Receive Millions in Funding

A new application to the European Universities Initiative call has been approved. The European university alliance coordinated by TU Berlin will now receive funding of 14,4 million euros. As announced by the European Commission on 3 July 2023, 30 alliances made of up 260 universities from throughout Europe will receive total funding of 402,2 million euros over the next four years. The funding is intended to help strengthen existing alliances or to establish new alliances. The EU's European Universities Initiative now supports 50 alliances involving of more than 430 universities.

ENHANCE has been receiving funding from the European Universities Initiative within the ERASMUS+ program since 2020. At the time of its initial proposal, the alliance consisted of seven members. For its application to the call for the second round of funding, ENHANCE was able to increase this number to ten with the addition of ETH Zurich, TU Delft and Gdańsk Tech as partners. ENHANCE thus benefits from the goal of the call, which is to deepen, intensify and improve the effectiveness of institutional collaborations within the European University Alliances in order to further advance the long-term vision of a European University. The inclusion of three new partner universities as full members further strengthens ENHANCE.

Prof. Dr. Geraldine Rauch, President of TU Berlin and Chair of the ENHANCE Board of Directors, welcomes the announcement,“As chair of the ENHANCE Board of Directors, I am delighted by the success of ENHANCE. The approval of the second phase of funding offers us the chance to build on and extend the successful work of the past three years. We can now consolidate and develop our vision for a European University as an alliance with ten partner universities.

ENHANCE is an important instrument of internationalization and has the potential to shape our universities in the long term. Working together in the alliance and learning from and with our trusted partners will help us meet future challenges. This will enable advances in science and technology for a responsible European transformation for the benefit of society.”

European Universities are a flagship initiative of the European Commission's higher education strategy. Based on fundamental European values, they jointly strive for excellence and sustainability in the design of 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 joint "Inter-university Campus". The European Universities Initiative has met with great interest among German universities. As of spring 2023, 42 German universities are involved in the existing 44 alliances, including TU Berlin’s Berlin University Alliance partners FU Berlin and HU Berlin as well as TU9 universities RWTH Aachen, TU Darmstadt, TU Dresden, Leibniz University Hannover, KIT Karlsruhe and TU Munich. German universities participating in European university alliances can apply for funding from the national support program of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in addition to EU funding.

ENHANCE has set itself a number of ambitious goals for the coming four years:

• Dismantle administrative hurdles through the ENHANCE One Campus program to help achieve borderless mobility for students and researchers between its partner institutions and thus facilitate exchange.
• Develop its joint learning strategy and increase its challenge-based learning offers as well as formats for life-long learning.
• Make it easy for its students to take advantage of ENHANCE mobility offers and benefit from studying abroad. Strengthen the link between teaching, research and innovation.
• Provide students with ready access to European research networks and innovation ecosystems.
• Strengthen the exchange between science and society so as to be able to develop solutions for the challenges facing society in the future.

The ENHANCE Alliance was founded in 2019, with the aim to develop one joint European campus, free of physical, administrative, or educational barriers, where students, faculty and staff can move freely to experience the European Education Area. The mission of ENHANCE is to drive responsible societal transformation and to promote the development and utilisation of science and technology – for the benefit of society. ENHANCE is participating in the ERASMUS+ programme European University Initiative and in the Horizon 2020 programme Science with and for Society (SwafS). The Alliance brings together ten member universities: Technische Universität Berlin (Germany), as the Coordinator, Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden), TU Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands), ETH Zurich (Switzerland), Gdańsk University of Technology (Poland), Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Norway), Politecnico di Milano (Italy), RWTH Aachen University (Germany), Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain) and Warsaw University of Technology (Poland).