A rash and foolish move

The decision of Education Minister José Ignacio Wert to change the endowment system for the Erasmus grants, and to do so with the academic year already under way, was so rash and so foolish a move that it had to be withdrawn only a few hours after being announced. It was an absurd measure both in style and in substance.

In style, because you cannot change the rules of the game when the match has already started, less so by surprise and by means of a ministerial order. The minister had decided that the ministry’s 100-to-180-euro Erasmus grant would be given only to students who already had a general scholarship because of their family’s low income, so that many of the almost 40,000 students who are studying at European universities under this program were suddenly left without money they were already counting on.

The decision was also wrong in substance. While it is praiseworthy that the ministry might wish to increase the size of the grant for children of low-income families, it is questionable that it should do so at the cost of the others. The Erasmus program has been considered a successful formula for the creation of European awareness, enabling thousands of students to study for a certain time in another country, which is positive for mutual understanding, and provides students with valuable experience, relationships and contacts for their professional future. And an additional advantage that, keeping our own rather poor starting point in mind, is decisive: the scheme improves the knowledge of languages. Spain is the country that sends and receives most students, so it is one of the countries that profits most from this system of student mobility, which at its inception was actively promoted by a Spanish member of the European Commission.

Given the nature of the program, the greater the number of students going to other countries under it, the greater the overall benefit for our country. In this case, the number of grants is indeed important. The argument that it is better to give out a smaller number of grants that are greater in quantity is a fallacy, when we observe that, since 2011, the budget package devoted to Erasmus scholarships has fallen from 62.7 million euros to barely 16 million.

The obvious advantages of the Erasmus grants explain the lightning reaction against the cutback measure, beginning with that from the European Commission itself, which called on the Spanish authorities to repair the damage that had been done to “the legitimate expectations of students” who had already traveled to foreign universities. Within Spain, the firm rejection expressed by the regional governments, the universities and also by leaders of his own Popular Party, caused the minister to change his line.

The affair comes on top of many other more or less controversial decisions, from the suppression of the Seneca grants that enable movement between Spanish universities to the tougher conditions for access to general scholarships. This new episode is a further step in Wert’s already lengthy track record of discord and strife, with an unnecessary admixture of arrogance and a disturbing lack of sensitivity to the need for genuine dialogue.