Demographic pressure and the search for students
Demographics provide the immediate motivation. Many smaller European universities, especially those located in Southern and Eastern Europe, have witnessed declining student enrollments, partially due to the migration of younger people to urban centers. Consequently, many institutions located in smaller cities must consider international recruitment for survival. Consider, for example, the University of Teramo in Italy, which experienced five consecutive years of declining enrollments, but then experienced a 25% increase in enrollment of new students, driven almost entirely by the international students that constituted 24% of the enrollment, versus the 4% of previous years. Along similar lines, the University of Tuscia in Viterbo outside of Rome experienced an approximate 400% increase in international student pre-enrolments, with applicants hailing from over 45 countries, over the span of approximately three weeks. These examples are emblematic of the need for international student enrollment to bolster the budgets of these smaller institutions through the receipt of government funding for every enrolled student.
The European Universities initiative as a catalyst
Among all of the larger trends, perhaps the European Universities initiative is the most potent. This program creates alliances that allow smaller and regional universities to be represented in the community. One example is the SUNRISE program, a consortium of 9 institutions, with members from 8 countries, all with smaller and mid-sized enrollment. TU Ilmenau, based in Germany, has coordinated this project which has a 14.4 million euro award. The noteworthy part of the program is its goal of strengthening universities in areas other than major cities. Partnership agreements created through this program allow member institutions to offer programs such as joint degrees, research, and mobility that a small, single institution could not offer on its own. Through the alliance, partners offer joint degrees, shared mobility programs, and collaborative research infrastructure that no single small institution could afford to build alone. For a university like the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano or the Polytechnic University of Viana do Castelo, participation in such an alliance provides instant European visibility and a network of partners that would be difficult to assemble independently.
English-taught programs as a gateway
The practical mechanism enabling this internationalisation is the rapid expansion of English-taught degree programs. The University of Bergamo now offers over 280 courses in foreign languages and roughly ten master's programs entirely in English, attracting students from more than 80 countries, with particularly strong representation from Iran, Turkey, and Morocco. Camerino, a small university in Italy's Marche region, has leveraged its English-taught offerings so effectively that it now ranks first among Italian universities with fewer than 10,000 students for international enrolments, and remarkably, 51% of all Chinese students enrolled in Italy chose Camerino. This concentration illustrates how a small institution with a focused strategy can capture a disproportionate share of a specific international market.
Turning smallness into an advantage
Some potential advantages to small universities beyond survival and funding include personalised attention, tighter community, and lower cost of living. International students who attended the University of St. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava, Slovakia, said the safety, living costs, and suggestions by family and friends were the main factors they chose for this institution. The vice-rector of the institution in Bergamo attributed its international students to the better quality of life and lower living costs as compared to Milan. The university town is attractive to many foreign students because of the crises in the major capital cities.
A note of caution
Some problems accompany rapid internationalization. Teramo illustrates some of these issues as recruitment agencies sign up international students and collect payments that include several thousands of euros while foreign students do not get sufficient support and institutional infrastructure. Reports indicate that many international students register for exams as ghost students and never take them. It seems some small universities cannot balance genuine educational provision and their efforts to grow their enrollment. Sustainability of this model is reliant on the institutions' ability to create support services such as language and cultural programs and help international students find housing.
Conclusion
Small European universities rely on English programs, strategic recruitment, and European alliances to adapt to demographic decline and dwindling resources. In so doing, these universities have begun to reconfigure European higher education away from traditional capitals toward more dispersed locations that are home to new academic communities. Whether this model of higher education can persist will depend on the degree to which these universities accept the incongruence between their recruitment of international students and genuine integration of those students into the campus community.
