Implementing and disseminating the European tertiary education register : executive summary

This report presents the main elements of the European Tertiary Education Register (ETER). ETER is a project funded by the European Commission, Directorate General for Education Youth, Sport and Culture for the years 2013-2017, which has established a comprehensive register of educational institutions delivering degrees at ISCED levels 6 (bachelor), 7 (master) and 8 (PhD). ETER provides data on more than 2,500 higher education institutions (HEIs) in 36 European countries for the years 2011-2014, covering more than 22 million undergraduate students. Data at the level of individual HEIs include organizational characteristics and geographical information, staff, revenues and expenditures, students, graduates, research activities and can be downloaded from the public ETER website (www.eter-project.com). This report presents the conceptual foundation of the ETER database and its methodological elements, the infrastructure which was developed to collect, validate and publish the ETER data, the main results in terms of coverage of HEI systems, of data availability and quality and data usage, some highlights on the structure of European higher education derived from ETER and, finally, a number of recommendations on the future development of the ETER system.