Facts and figures

Budget: 92 million Euros (2022)

More than 340 employees (2022) at the OeAD locations in Austria and abroad advise, support and connect people and institutions in education, science, research and culture.

7 OeAD international cooperation offices: The OeAD has a network of seven international cooperation offices in priority regions of Austrian education and science cooperation, namely in the EU's neighbouring countries to the east (Russia, Ukraine, Republic of Moldova), the Western Balkan countries (regional offices Tirana and Sarajevo) and China (Shanghai).

The OeAD answers more than 5,000 enquiries per year on studies, scholarships, cooperation and the law relating to aliens. The OeAD is thus the Austrian competence centre for advising international higher education institutions, scientists and scholars and students.

At 12 international higher education fairs in 2021 the OeAD represented all Austrian higher education institutions. The OeAD advises on the topics of studying and research in Austria as well as on cooperation and scholarship possibilities.

200 “Welt im Ohr” radio broadcasts: “Welt im Ohr” (“World in your Ear”) is the OeAD radio series in cooperation with ORF Ö1 Campus and the largest audio archive on topics of development research and development policy in German language. For two years now there have also been Welt im Ohr programmes on other educational topics of the OeAD.

1,800 tests per year at OeAD International Testing Services: The OeAD Test Centre conducts globally recognised admission tests and professional examinations for higher education institutions, using state-of-the-art biometric procedures.

 

Erasmus+ and European Solidarity Corps:

As the national agency for Erasmus+ and the European Solidarity Corps in Austria the OeAD supports thousands of stays abroad every year. Within Erasmus+ Education up to 240,000 participants from Austria are expected to go abroad with Erasmus+ during the programme period 2021-2027 in the four education areas – higher education, school education, vocational education and training and adult education. This is an average of around 34,300 people per year. Within Erasmus+ Youth it is 13,000 people per year, i.e. by the end of the programme period around 91,000 participants will have taken advantage of the exchange opportunities. From 2021 to 2027 Austria expects to receive 683 million euros for Erasmus+ and the ESC from European Union funds.

In the case of the central programmes of Erasmus+ projects are submitted directly to Brussels; there is worldwide competition. The OeAD supports the higher education institutions with an extensive range of advisory services. In the field of Capacity Building in Higher Education, Jean Monnet, Erasmus Mundus, European Universities and Knowledge Alliances more than 14,600 projects were submitted worldwide between 2014 and 2020. Of the 225 projects submitted by Austria as coordinator 35% were approved, which is a significantly higher percentage than the average (21.9%).

In the “Erasmus back to School” project Erasmus students have visited their former schools for 10 years, talking about their experiences and arousing an interest for a stay abroad in the pupils. Since the start of the project more than 600 school visits have taken place and 18,000 pupils have been reached. Now the project has been extended to other areas of education.

Within the framework of the global expansion of the Erasmus+ programme 1,660 mobility activities of students and higher education staff between Austria and 65 countries on all continents were funded in 2020. Erasmus+ international promotes networking of universities worldwide and in all disciplines.

 

Internationalisation:

Besides Erasmus+ the OeAD also offers scholarships and research funding for students and researchers from all over the world. 1,700 incoming scholarships were awarded in 2019. The most popular scholarships are the Ernst Mach Scholarship, and CEEPUS for the region of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, as well as subject-specific programmes such as the Franz Werfel Scholarship or the Richard Plaschka Scholarship. In the database for scholarships and research grants www.grants.at you can systematically search for funding possibilities.

Within the framework of the Ernst Mach Programme, for example, the OeAD was able to award a total of 283 incoming scholarships in 2020. Whether it is from Argentina, Mexico, Vietnam, Ghana or Slovakia – the Ernst Mach scholarship holders came to Austria from a total of 54 countries worldwide.

Despite corona-related restrictions 54 Marietta Blau fellows were able to optimise their dissertations in 2020 by means of longer scientific stays abroad and to gain experience in an international research environment.

The OeAD Lectureship Programme is a mobility programme for the promotion of the German language and the teaching of Austrian culture abroad. More than 100 lecturers work at around 100 locations in 31 countries around the globe.

Language assistants are a valuable addition to foreign language teaching. In addition to the language they also bring knowledge about the country and its people into the classroom. 420 foreign language assistants do this at Austrian schools and 175 language assistants from Austria teach German abroad. At around 1,000 schools per year the language assistant programme supports foreign language teaching.

Since 2009 APPEAR – the Austrian Partnership Programme in Higher Education and Research for Development – has supported 189 scholarship holders from the partner countries of the Austrian Development Cooperation (ADC).

56 higher education institutions in Africa-Uninet: The network currently consists of 35 universities in 15 African countries and 21 higher education institutions in Austria.

 

Education and society:

Every year 155,000 pupils in Austria are involved in cultural projects through OeAD offers for “cultural education with schools”.

Since the beginning of the project series (1989) 26,318 apprentices from 2,340 companies and 158 vocational schools have participated in cultural education projects.

With the OeAD's Young Science programme 240 Young Science ambassadors visit schools throughout Austria on a voluntary basis and talk about their fields of research and their professional careers. This gives the pupils an opportunity to ask researchers questions directly and gain insights into their daily work.

299 Sparkling Science projects: In the science education projects 4,200 researchers worked side by side with 101,000 young people and 2,600 teachers on current research questions between 2007 and 2019. In September 2021 the science education project, which is unique in Europe, started its second phase.