Building the technological European Community through education: European mobility and training programmes in the 1980s

Abstract

The Community Action Programme for Education and Training for Technology (COMETT) played a key role in paving the way for increased cooperation between the member states of the European Community (EC) in the field of education and in the promotion of intra-Europe mobility. In this article, COMETT is considered as a non-traditional education and training programme for solving economic challenges in the context of technological change that was focused on the training of a highly skilled workforce. The process of setting the agenda for COMETT is studied through an analysis of official EC policy documents and archival material from the EU’s historical archives in Florence. Our analysis suggests that the challenge posed by new information technologies acted as a catalyst for a new approach to education governance that was based on closer cooperation between European universities and industry. Promoting intra-Europe mobility among highly skilled workers and students was a key part of the programme, which defined an economic and social strategy for Europe in response to technological change. Educational and social goals were secondary in the design and implementation of the COMETT programme, which, first and foremost, was motivated by the EC agenda to boost the competitiveness of European industry.

The societal role of universities and their alliances: the case of the EuroTeQ Engineering University

“…First, EU tertiary education projects such as the EU-sponsored Erasmus programme have been guided by the idea of creating European integration by encouraging student exchange between member states (Flury et al, 2021;Brooks, 2021;Corbett, 2005). As demonstrated in the Erasmus student exchange programme, tertiary education is the primary level on which such integration takes place.…”

“…However, the creation of European alliances, with roughly five to eight members, aimed at setting educational standards and intensifying collaboration in various fields, is a relatively novel phenomenon and has few precedents. Recent literature has started to examine the main themes addressed by these alliances (Fumasoli & Rossi, 2021;Brooks & Rensimer, 2023), their alignment with the economic competitiveness of Europe (Flury et al, 2021), and their alignment with good practices according to the Civic Universities' standards (Arnaldo Valdes & Gomez Comendador, 2022). In addition, there are important questions about the motives and incentives of universities for joining such alliances.…”