The Erasmus Network
zarasophos.net
zarasophos.net
As someone once told me 15 years ago, the EU has had two great successes: the Erasmus program, and Ryanair.
Ryanair was the first company in Europe to be massively successful offering low cost international flights (being allowed by new regulations) and drastically changed the market.
One difference I recall was that being a university student in Germany felt like a super-power compared to my time in the U.S. Everything seemed less expensive, subsidized travel and housing, lots of events hosted for you to meet people…
Can anyone else explain more?
In Europe, we also say "erasmus" for people who went abroad, outside the EU (USA for example). It's harder to go on an exchange in the USA as you have to translate your grades, everything is more expensive (no european health insurance, etc).
Hope this helps.
In Sweden, we only use that word to talk about exchange studies within that program. If someone mentions Erasmus, I would never, before reading your comment, even consider they might mean going to the USA.
Not to disqualify your experience, it might very well be used like that in your country or language. I just thought it was a bit interesting.
In my city I organized movie nights inside of the university and showed Austrian movies with english subtitles (e.g. Wolf Haas movies or "Muttertag") so foreign exchange students could learn about Austria and Austrian humour. There was a welcome party at the beginning of every semester in a big club with 600+ people and a goodbye party at the end of every semester. In between there were movie nights, museum vists, skiing trips, wine road trips, city tours, pub crawls and lots of other stuff to do and get to know Graz and Austria.
All of this is organized by volunteers (ESN members) who do this in their free time. There are city chapters of ESN (ESN Graz, ESN Vienna etc.) and above them a country chapter (ESN Austria). ESN Austria is a platform where all the volunteers meet and exchange information and ideas and talk about what works and what doesn't for our students. ESN Austria organized a skiing trip every year where they booked whole hotel and hundreds of Erasmus students from all over Austria could go there and try out skiing for a few days. Participating was cheap for the Erasmus students because ESN people got sponsors on board (e.g. free Red Bull and lots of other stuff). ESN Austria also had a cooperation with an Austrian telco and if you were an Erasmus students and you come to our office during our office hours, we give you a free sim card and a cheap bank account. The telco and the bank would pay us a few € for every activated sim card and every opened bank account and since ESN is a non-profit that money would go right back to the students (e.g. subsidized museum trips and other cultural events). It's really a win-win-win situation for everyone.
I was never on Erasmus but I was a volunteer for ESN both in my hometown and in our national chapter and due to this I got to know lots of amazing people, both volunteers and students, learned a lot, had a lot of fund and acquired a few skills that would turn out to be quite useful in my later life.
I wonder if the US would benefit from providing a similar scheme of cross-country exchanges
https://erasmus.robinfellinger.eu/
Was quite fun playing around and exploring that dataset.
I didn't get to do any exchange programs just 4 years of my nose to grindstone. And I feel like I really missed out and messed up.
I can literally identify multiple people!
Why hasn't this data at the very least been aggregated in such a way that any random idiot like me can't just take a quick look and identify at least 2 people in less than 5 minutes?
How is this in line with GDPR? Certainly the exceptions for statistics don't totally eliminate the requirement for them to minimize the data collection and publication to only fulfill the requirements.
What legal basis do they have to make personal information of thousands of people freely available with no anonymization at all?
What public benefit is there in making public the data for specific people, instead of non-uniquely identifiable buckets of people?
And while it's likely that local legal conditions differs a bit and that it changed over time, I'm not surprised that such high level data are public.
How did you identify two people from that data? have I missed something, I only see the following:
HOMEINSTITUTION;COUNTRYCODEOFHOMEINSTITUTION;AGE;GENDER;NATIONALITY;SUBJECTAREA;LEVELSTUDY;YEARSPRIOR;MOBILITYTYPE;HOSTINSTITUTION;COUNTRYCODEOFHOSTINSTITUTION;PLACEMENTENTERPRISE;COUNTRYOFPLACEMENT;ENTERPRISESIZE;TYPEPLACEMENTSECTOR;LENGTHSTUDYPERIOD;LENGTHPLACEMENT;SHORTDURATION;STUDYSTARTDATE;PLACEMENTSTARTDATE;CONSORTIUMAGREEMENTNUMBER;ECTSCREDITSSTUDY;ECTSCREDITSPLACEMENT;TOTALECTSCREDITS;SNSUPPLEMENT;TAUGHTHOSTLANG;LANGUAGETAUGHT;LINGPREPARATION;STUDYGRANT;PLACEMENTGRANT;PREVIOUSPARTICIPATION;QUALIFICATIONATHOST
Based on that alone I now know the unique ID of the people who went, and subsequently their start and end date, their gender, the courses they took, etc... Data that I would otherwise not know about them.
This isn't a theoretical risk either, i legitimately identified someone else, and learned information I did no know about them from that dataset.
Now we're friends and I'm sure they wouldn't mind me knowing what I learned, but it's nonetheless a violation.
What unique ID do you mean? I can't find any unique ID type of column in any of the files published.
> the courses they took
In what file can you see the list of courses they took? I don't think it's shared anywhere.
> and subsequently their start and end date, their gender
> now we're friends and I'm sure they wouldn't mind me knowing what I learned
You're friends and you just learned their gender? Sorry to be nitpicking like this. You had known their gender previously and that helped you identify them in the dataset, not the other way round?
I don't think you are. I'm guessing that for an institution with a small number of people on the Erasmus program you can match people by gender/approximate age/start date to someone in the Erasmus data and hence what, when and where they studied on their Erasmus year.
This looks like information that would be on LinkedIn. I'm not sure many people would find this to be an invasion of privacy and isn't covered by the the GDPR
Yes, you might know which specific person took that journey, but you have prior knowledge.
The fact is I learned new personal information about someone else from this dataset. The fact that I already had some information about that person is no excuse.
What could you possible learn from the map you didn't already know before? The time they went and if they taught their native language their and similar stuff. Yeah, okay i see your point.
All of those things are personal information subject to GDPR. I would certainly get in trouble if I collected information on the location of specific people and made it available, why don't they?
What's 4% of the turnover of the EU?