Biden should... "Help More Americans Study Abroad"

Moisés Naím / The Washington Post

Erasmus was a Dutch philosopher widely recognized as one of the leading humanists of the Renaissance. Erasmus is also the name for the European Union’s breathtakingly ambitious program to help millions of young people study outside their own country. America needs its own Erasmus.

Formally launched in 1987, the E.U. program organizes and finances student exchanges across the continent. Its budget for 2014-2020 was nearly $18 billion, and there are plans to raise it to nearly $26 billion for 2021-2027. The program gives 4 million Europeans the opportunity to study, train and live in other member countries.

Erasmus was created in a climate of idealism and high pan-European ambition. Imagine, the nascent E.U. leaders thought, a continent where millions of young Europeans know not just the languages and customs of their neighbors but have real human connections across national borders. The goal was to encode cosmopolitanism in a whole generation.

To defeat the narrow parochialism that brought us the calamity of the Trump presidency, America needs its own Erasmus program: the kind of deep understanding of another nation and a different culture that a year abroad can offer and thus, hopefully, mitigate the forces that stoke racism, xenophobia, and narrow-mindedness.

Today, as David Hamburger has argued, government programs sponsoring Americans to study abroad are underfunded and largely out of reach for many. Funding for flagship programs like Fulbright and the Peace Corps in the United States is a fraction of what it is with Erasmus. That’s nowhere near enough. In inflation-adjusted dollars, Fulbright funding even declined 10 percent over the past decade.

A large, ambitious Erasmus-like program targeted at minorities and low-income Americans would not, on its own, heal the rifts that so deeply divide this society. Poor Americans have a hard-enough time financing education in their own country. For them, studying abroad may sound like a pipe dream.

But in fact, other countries educate their youngsters at a fraction of the cost of the American system, meaning an American Erasmus could potentially save as much money as it costs, or more. And it could do this while strengthening America’s ties with the world and, thereby, strengthening America itself.

Moisés Naím is a distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.