Twenty European university alliances have just received €145.6 million in Erasmus+ funding for 2026. This choice illustrates an educational model that is consolidating at the continental level: Europe finances alliances to strengthen the international competitiveness of higher education, with declared objectives of inclusion and geographic balance.
The Essentials
- Phenomena of talent concentration in certain university hubs are observed at the European scale.
- The Excellence Strategy had a total annual budget of €533 million from 2019 to 2025, with an increase planned for 2026-2027.
- The 20 Erasmus+ alliances selected in 2026 bring together 190 universities from several countries, according to the European Commission.
- These two instruments, German and European, offer levers for observing the center-periphery mechanics in higher education.
- Alternatives exist: geographic quotas in selection criteria, compensation funds for losing regions, resource-sharing mechanisms within alliances.
The German Excellence Strategy, Laboratory for the Continental Model
Germany launched an excellence initiative in 2005, but the claim that Europe is imitating its architecture is not established. Since 2005, the initiative and then the excellence strategy have selectively financed cutting-edge research; the Exzellenzstrategie has existed since 2016. The wager is explicit: it is better to have a few universities at Stanford’s level than fifty mediocre establishments.
For the European Universities initiative, the 2026 call mentions an indicative total Erasmus+ budget of €1.2 billion for 2021-2027; the 2026 call itself is endowed with €145.6 million for transitional funding over a maximum duration of 24 months. Clusters are implanted particularly in Munich, Berlin, Heidelberg and Hamburg, among 43 host universities in total. The clusters are selected through competitive scientific evaluation by international panels.
The model functions in a self-reinforcing way. A university receiving excellence funding attracts high-level researchers. Subsequent calls are awarded after a new competitive scientific evaluation, without an automatic mechanism based on citations. Certain regions, particularly in eastern Germany, experience migratory flows of students and researchers toward major university hubs.
Excellence clusters are implanted in certain German regions that exhibit territorial disparities.
Erasmus+ 2026: Twenty Alliances, 190 Universities, A Predictable Geography
The European Union selected in 2026 twenty European university alliances within the framework of an Erasmus+ call endowed with €145.6 million, according to data from the European Commission. These alliances bring together 190 universities and are intended to create transnational campuses, to harmonize curricula, and to facilitate student mobility on an unprecedented scale.
The ambition is real. Enabling a student from Lisbon to validate part of their diploma in Warsaw or Ghent without losing either credits or social rights represents concrete progress. These alliances also finance common pedagogical projects, double degrees, and shared laboratories. Erasmus mobility has already proven its effectiveness over four decades in strengthening the sense of European belonging and broadening students’ professional horizons.
In 2026, Erasmus+ criteria depend on each action; quality and operational capacity can be examined, but geographic balance is not a universal selection criterion. Beneficiaries must be alliances that already have deep transnational institutional cooperation. Certain establishments encounter obstacles in constructing competitive proposals, particularly when faced with institutions that have consolidated experience in managing European projects.
Alliances must associate establishments from several countries and cover a broad geographic scope, without an imposed hierarchy between partners. These partners benefit from the funding, and their strategic role depends on the governance models of each alliance.
Regional Brain Drain: A Structural Mechanism
This phenomenon has a name in economic literature: territorial brain drain. It differs from international brain drain in its scale and political invisibility. When a Romanian engineer leaves for Munich, public opinion in Romania perceives it as a national loss. When a student from Clermont-Ferrand or Zaragoza permanently settles in Paris or Madrid after their studies, the phenomenon remains largely under the radar of public debate.
Alliances must cooperate with economic and innovation ecosystems to improve student employability. Migration toward major university hubs represents a rational choice at the individual scale. Migrations contribute to regional demographic reconfigurations; the relationship with excellence clusters remains to be established.
Targeted excellence funding could accelerate certain processes of territorial concentration. Regions with fewer university resources face increased challenges in financing their establishments and participating in European project calls. Geographic homogamy of human capital—the concentration of talent where other talents are already present—functions at the scale of cities and regions as it functions at the household scale.
The other issue is that of the long-term labor market. An increasing number of European countries struggle to recruit secondary school teachers. Student population movements can influence the availability of human teaching resources in certain territories. University concentration could be linked to the teacher recruitment challenges observed in certain regions.
The Proven Results of University Alliances
Diagnosing territorial imbalance should not obscure what these instruments actually enable. European university alliances constitute an institutional experiment without precedent in the history of higher education. They compel universities from very different academic cultures—Germanic Humboldtian traditions, Anglo-Saxon systems in Nordic countries, more centralized Latin universities—to cooperate concretely on curricula, degrees, and pedagogical practices.
This cooperation produces tangible effects. It diffuses teaching practices, digital tools, and evaluation methods from one university to another. A more modest partner university in an alliance dominated by a highly reputed establishment benefits from transfers of methods and international legitimacy it would not have obtained alone. Students from these universities gain access to networks to which they would not have had access in a configuration without an alliance.
The German Excellence Strategy is accompanied by an observable increase in scientific production in participating establishments; a specific causal analysis of the funding effect remains to be deepened. Certain German universities rank at high levels of international rankings. Partnerships and transfer activities exist, but startups and contracts do not constitute a demonstrated systemic translation of excellence gains. Economic spillovers may exist locally, but their general causality through academic competitiveness is not established.
The problem is therefore not excellence in itself. The current architecture offers insufficient means to widely diffuse the benefits of excellence to other territories.
Corrective Instruments That Exist, and Those That Are Missing
Several approaches are being experimented with in Europe to attenuate this concentration mechanism. They deserve serious examination rather than being relegated to a vague appeal for “territorial balance.”
The first approach is that of geographic criteria in selection. Certain Erasmus+ calls already integrate requirements for representation of academically less advanced countries, with lists of eligible countries under preferential conditions. This approach limits the complete capture of funding by the same hubs, but it does not resolve the imbalance in capacity to construct competitive proposals.
The second approach is that of capacity-building funds, distinct from excellence funds. The Erasmus+ program includes a “Capacity Building in Higher Education” (CBHE) component that precisely finances universities in developing countries or less advanced regions to improve their governance, programs, and international connectivity. The expansion of this type of instrument within the European space itself, not only toward third countries, would be a logical response to the observed imbalance.
The third approach is internal to the alliances themselves. Well-designed alliances can include mechanisms for resource-sharing, co-location of chairs, rotation of coordination responsibilities. A few of the twenty alliances selected in 2026 are experimenting with these arrangements. Their evaluation by 2028-2030 will tell whether this internal architecture suffices to correct the centripetal tendency.
A systematic evaluation of the initiative is already underway and published; a more detailed territorial causal analysis could nevertheless supplement it to identify the effect of excellence funding on talent flows. Without data, it is impossible to pilot a correction. The first priority should be to establish this assessment. The 20 alliances of 2026 can provide new terrain for monitoring at the European scale.
The 2030 Horizon
The effects of funding concentrated on university excellence are not visible in two years. They are measured over a generation of students. This is why the 2026-2030 window is decisive: the Erasmus+ alliances selected this year will produce their first cohorts of transnational graduates, their first mobility evaluations, their first assessments of geographic distribution of beneficiaries.
If this data confirms the expected trend—concentration of benefits in leading universities, weak return of talent to peripheral regions—Europe will have a political problem as much as an academic one. Excellence funding will be perceived in losing regions as an additional instrument of reverse redistribution: the taxes of peripheries financing the competitiveness of metropolitan centers. This narrative already exists in debate over structural funds, the Common Agricultural Policy, and industrial policy. Higher education is not yet part of it, but it could be.
The objective is to construct evaluation and redistribution systems that make excellence compatible with territorial cohesion. Other domains have explored this articulation: medical research policy has learned to distinguish centers of excellence from networks for disseminating practices. Industrial policy is experimenting with instruments of territorial opening that widen competitiveness geographically without replacing it.
The designers of upcoming Erasmus+ calls and governments that finance their own excellence strategies have the means to measure the effect of these programs on the territories that finance them without being the first beneficiaries. Participating establishments are identifiable and tracking data exists, but complete traceability of individual student flows is not established by available sources. A more detailed territorial causal analysis of funding effects on regions could supplement existing systematic evaluations.
Sources
- European Commission, 20 European Universities Alliances selected for Erasmus+ funding (2026)
- German Excellence Strategy 2026-2027, Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF)
- Erasmus+ Capacity Building in Higher Education (CBHE) Call 2026, European Commission, Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture
- European Commission, Education Recovery Plan 2026
