The number of English-taught or English-medium bachelor’s programmes being offered by European universities has increased 50-fold in the past eight years, according to a major study. Research from the European Association for International Education (EAIE) and international study platform StudyPortals indicates there are 2,900 such courses being offered today at universities in continental Europe, up from just 55 in 2009. The analysis is based on StudyPortals’ database of undergraduate degrees, covering institutions in 19 European Higher Education Area countries, plus interviews with higher education professionals from six countries.

Turkey offers 545 English-taught bachelor’s courses — almost one-fifth of those documented in the study — while significant numbers are found in the Netherlands (317), Spain (241) and Germany (225). Germany also has the highest number of universities offering such programmes (69).

Meanwhile, Switzerland and the Netherlands have the highest proportion of universities offering English-taught bachelor’s degrees, at 100 percent and 75 percent, respectively, according to the report English-Taught Bachelor’s Programmes: Internationalising European Higher Education, which was launched at the EAIE’s annual conference in Seville on September 14.

More than a quarter (26 percent) of the programmes are offered in business and management, while social sciences (15 percent) and engineering and technology (14 percent) are also popular disciplines for English-taught degrees. The trend follows significant growth in the number of English-medium Masters courses: a 2014 report found that 8,089 of these are being run on the Continent.

Anna-Malin Sandstrom, policy officer at the EAIE and co-author of the report, says that all respondents interviewed predict that the number of English-medium bachelor’s programmes in their country would continue to grow. “The data also indicate that there is room for growth: in the majority of countries studied, less than half of the higher education institutions appear to offer English-taught bachelor’s (courses) while, in all the countries, English medium bachelor’s (courses) constitute less than a third of the English-taught programmes (when) Masters and bachelor’s level (are) combined,” she explains.

The report states that English medium bachelor’s programmes should be seen as “a mechanism to internationalise and improve the learning outcomes for graduates”, but some academics have criticised the growth in such courses.

Gerard Verhoef, a member of Beter Onderwijs Nederland, which works to raise education standards in the Netherlands has launched a petition calling for education to be in Dutch, unless there is an obvious need for instruction in another language. He says that the trend means that the Dutch language “in secondary education and as the language of our leaders is threatened”.