EU gives £730 million to British universities

In the topical debate of the upcoming European Union (EU) referendum, it is necessary to consider the economic effects on UK universities with regard to the EU funds in Research and Development (R&D).

Currently, around 15% of the budget allocated to UK universities comes from the EU, approximately £730 million a year.

According to British Influence 2015, this is the second largest share of EU research funding (after Germany)

This is on top of the UK’s own government funding, which in 2015 is allocating £1,558 million for research in England alone (according to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE)).

Furthermore, the 15% does not include programs such as Erasmus, an EU-funded student exchange programme. More than 200,000 students and 20,000 academics have taken part in the EU’s university exchange scheme since its launch in 1987.

According to Dame Julia Goodfellow, the president-elect of Universities UK, programmes such as this will no longer continue if the UK decides to leave the EU at the end of 2017.

“It is abundantly clear that the UK’s membership of the European Union has an overwhelmingly positive impact on our world-leading universities.” She told The Independent.

Between 2014 and 2020, the ‘Horizon 2020’, a relatively new European Union scheme, is allocating a budget of €70.2 billion in what it has dubbed ‘The EU Framework program for Research and Innovation’, and its major goal is to secure Europe’s global competitiveness in scientific research.

This is good news for Warwick, already ranked as the seventh research university in the UK according to the Research Excellence Framework, and this new project means it is predicted to rise ever higher.

Of course, this is all dependent on the result of the EU referendum, on which Warwick and other UK universities will undoubtedly be influenced by.