The Erasmus Academic Exchange Program Turns Thirty (2017)

In order to promote cooperation between European universities as well as student exchange within the member countries, the European Union founded the Erasmus program in 1987. Named after the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (d. 1536) and short for European Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students, the project was expanded in 2014: measures for cooperation in higher education, school education, vocational and adult education, as well as youth and sports promotion, now fall under Erasmus+ or Erasmus Plus.
Erasmus+ is considered a European success story: by 2017, the project had supported more than four million students, hundreds of thousands of them from Germany alone. Universities in Spain and Germany were particularly popular destinations, followed by France, the UK and Italy.