EUROSTAT
Directorate F: Social statistics
Doc. Eurostat/F/13/DSS/02/3.4 EN
Item 3.4
Project on the register for tertiary education institutions: state of play (ETER)
meeting of the European directors of social statistics
Luxembourg, 18-19 November 2013
BECH building
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1.0 Development since the DSS-meeting 20-21 September 2012
The project on establishing a European Tertiary Education Register (ETER) was presented to the Directors of Social Statistics (DSS) in September 2012 by Mr Jordi Curell, Director “Lifelong learning: higher education and international affairs”. Mr Curell recalled the Communication on "Supporting growth and jobs – an agenda for the modernisation of Europe's higher education systems", as well as the promising results from the EUMIDA feasibility study and outlined the need to move a step further through the proposed data collection with a strong emphasis on minimising burden on respondents.
The DSS in the discussion that followed supported the project, i.e. the future data collection. It was clarified that Eurostat will provide methodological support in order that the data collected are consistent with the education statistics available through the UOE data collection. It was also mentioned that the project has no direct link with the U-Multirank project, apart from the fact that both tools (Register and U-Multirank) will be used for transparency purposes. At least 13 Member States confirmed their interest in participating to the Task Force to accompany the project which has since been established.
Following the Open Call for Tender[1] a Consortium was selected to take the initiative forward. The Consortium is led by the Universita della Svizzera italiana together with Joanneum Research Forschungsgellschaft, NIFU Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation Research and Education and Università di Roma La Sapienza. The contract was signed on 1. August 2013 and the project will run for two years.
The directors of Social Statistics are invited to:- take note of the conclusions of the first Task Force meeting 10 October 2013 and take note of the current developments and intended next steps;
- appoint contact person(s) between National Statistical Authorities (NSAs) and the ETER-consortium
This document gives an overview of the state of play on the development of a European Tertiary Education Register (ETER).
2.0 Conclusions from the first Task Force meeting
The Task Force consists of the following 15 countries AT, BE (fr and nl), CZ, DE, ES, FR, HR, HU, IE, LT, LV, PL, PT, SE and TR and met for the first time on 10 October 2013. All countries, including those not participating on the Task Force, received the documents in advance and were invited to submit comments. DG EAC (Chair), DG RTD and Eurostat represented the Commission.
The Task Force[2] proved to be a successful setting for a constructive discussion of many points on the implementation of the initiative, in particular clarifying the following points:
· It was made clear that the ETER data collection should not be considered as a new data collection, but rather an exercise based on the regular UOE collection: in many cases the same data is used, though ETER collects data at institutional level whereas the UOE covers data on students, graduates etc. across these institutions.
· The Task Force proposed that the principal responsibility for liaising with the Consortium should be for the NSAs, with the national experts[3] taking only a secondary role where the data requested was not immediately available to the NSA (for example meta-data such as the foundation dates for higher education institutions). This was agreed
· Within the framework of the UOE data collection, Eurostat will use ISCED 1997 for the academic year 2011-2012 and only change to ISCED 2011 in 2014 for the academic year 2012-2013. In order to make possible a link between ISCED 1997 and ISCED 2011, countries providing ISCED 1997 for ETER will be asked to provide their ISCED mapping of national programmes and qualifications to help convert the data.
· The Task Force proposed that the perimeter of the data collection exercise should be defined so as to maximise the coverage of students and research activities, while excluding the very smallest institutions (with exceptions possible for some small, highly specialised institutions which may play a key role within a country) and invited the Consortium to do further work on this point. Subsequently, the Consortium proposes to fix the perimeter to include all institutions with more than 200 students and/or 30 academic staff.
· The issue of publication of data was discussed. The Task Force agreed that all data are, in principle, public and thus can be made public at the individual HEI-level. Use of these data by researchers etc. would not be subject to restrictions or to authorization, but users would be requested to indicate the original source of data in their own publications. In exceptional and well justified cases (e.g. binding legal requirements at national level – eg where the data subject is so small to permit the identification of individuals), some of the data may be ‘restricted’. The Task Force considered it unlikely that there would be very much confidential data involved (perhaps only related to military research and or other national security issues) in which case the NSAs would probably not have access to them in the first place. Agreements concerning the disclosure of data collected will be made between all NSAs and the Consortium on this basis.
· Finally, it was again stressed that there is no formal connection between the U-Multirank university ranking initiative and ETER. While U-Multirank will look at the performance of HEIs across certain dimensions, ETER will be limited to collecting data to enable profiling. However, it will be important to align definitions as far as possible, to facilitate the participation of higher education institutions in the two exercises and, in the case of ETER, to minimise the administrative burden for NSAs.
3.0 Next steps
Based on feedback from the Task Force, the Consortium is completing the ETER handbook (to be uploaded in Circa) for the data collection for the academic year 2011/12. The ETER handbook will be adapted on an on-going basis up to the final delivery in 2015. The data collection is scheduled to start in November 2013 and continue until February 2014. The indicative publication of first results is spring/summer 2014. The second data collection is scheduled to take place from autumn 2014. In the second data collection possible new indicators will be discussed. The next meeting of the Task Force is scheduled to take place in May 2014 to discuss the outcomes and analysis of the first data collection, and prior to the first publication. The DSS will be kept regularly informed of progress.
In order to facilitate the implementation of the initiative, the members of the DSS who have not yet appointed a contact person are kindly asked to submit their contact person to DG EAC (contact person: ) as soon as possible. Directors may wish to designate the regular contact point for the UOE data collect
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[1] EAC/31/2012 Establishing a European Tertiary Education Register
[2] The full minutes from the Task Force will be uploaded on Circa
[3] National experts are members of the ETER consortium, partly appointed directly by the core partners, partly as national subcontractors. They are people with good experience in Higher Education and a profound knowledge of the national systems. The ETER national experts have the function of lining the ETER consortium and the NSAs for the purpose of the data collection. The involvement of each national expert will be decided upon individually.