Ghent voted best city in Europe to go on an Erasmus student exchange

At the start of the month, the Erasmus Generation Event, an international conference about the popular European exchange programme for students in higher education, was held in Romania, Ghent was proclaimed the best Erasmus student exchange destination thanks to the good cooperation that exists between the university (UGent), the colleges of higher education that are based there, the city authorities and the international student association in Ghent.

"We competed against Vienna, Valencia, Toulouse and Padua in the final. We were chosen as the top destination by the European Commission and representatives of various international student associations," Frederik De Decker of Ghent University told VRT News.

A short presentation given by Ghent at the conference proved to be enough to convince those in attendance. "We certainly owe this award to the fact that we take care of students so well and help them with issues such as housing. It is not easy for international students to find a room in Ghent."

The recognition given to the East Flemish city should ensure that Ghent takes an even more prominent place on the radar of students that are considering the Erasmus exchange programme.

"We suspect that this will have an impact. At UGent, there is certainly still capacity to receive more foreign students," Mr De Decker explains. "There are 1,500 Erasmus students in Ghent each year, we could take a few more."

"Ghent is now popular with Spaniards. Large countries simply have big groups of students that want to study abroad. We also see that, for example, many Polish students also find their way to Ghent. German and French students are also well represented. We also have cooperation agreements with smaller countries such as Estonia and Sweden and larger groups of students are now also coming here from these countries as well”.