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For Joacim Westerberg Njie, it was primarily the social that attracted. And he got what he wanted. The Dutch, German, French and Chinese in the same hall quickly became her friends. They went out to party and studied together. Sometimes at the same time. You still hear from friends often and have also met in the Netherlands and France.
– I learned a lot about myself and about other cultures, he says.
The exchange, which has been called Erasmus + since 2014, meant that Joacim found it easy to take into account his British qualifications and enter a Stockholm University degree once he returned to Sweden. The Erasmus grant of a few thousand crowns helped cover the additional costs of living abroad.
In 2016, in addition to Joacim Westerberg Njie, just over 4,000 Swedes completed an Erasmus. Most of them, like Jehoiakim, went to Great Britain.
Since 1987, more than 300,000 British students have participated in the Erasmus program. In 2017, 16,500 Britons participated. In the same year, 31,727 EU citizens completed Erasmus in the UK, according to official figures. Last year, a total of 940,000 Europeans benefited from the program with a budget of 3.4 billion euros.
One of those who once took that “chance” is Skylar Longridge from Newcastle in the north of England. He came to Sweden in 2016 as an Erasmus student and studied for a year at Stockholm University. In 2019, he moved to Stockholm permanently. He spent Christmas Eve with one of his Swedish friends whom he met during his Erasmus in Stockholm. In the background was the broadcast of Brexit.
– It was sad when the message came, she says.
– Promises have been made that Erasmus would not be touched. Norway and Turkey are participating although they are not part of the EU. I hoped it was so. But, from a British perspective, Erasmus has unfortunately never really hit in Britain. In my class, only two of us went to an exchange, of 300 students.
Skylar Longridge hopes that it will soon become clear what the exchange opportunities will look like with the UK departure going forward.
– But honestly, I think this is academic suicide for the British, he says.
Boris Johnson: difficult decision
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson calls the decision to leave Erasmus “tough”. Instead, a global exchange program will be launched across the UK in the coming days, according to the UK government. It will be named after Alan Turing, the man who led the team that cracked the code system of Nazi Germany.
“British students will not only have the opportunity to study in Europe, but also in the best universities in the world,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson said at a press conference on Christmas Eve.
Scotland’s Regional Prime Minister Nicola Sturgeon calls the decision to leave Erasmus “cultural vandalism” and Sweden’s former Prime Minister Carl Bildt writes on Twitter that “it is probably a conscious choice to cut ties between British youth. and other young Europeans. ” Its aim is to cut ties with Europe also in the future ”.
