Strong points
Education
The association offers a spectrum of 58 Bachelor course and 108 Master courses. With this partnership, the education offered by the two member partners of the association, the VUB and EhB, will be further reorganised so as to comply with the Bachelor-Master structure envisaged by the Bologna Declaration.
One of the main assets of the Universitaire Associatie Brussel is the complementary character of its courses. On the Jette campus, for instance, the ‘wellness’ courses form a complete range: students of the EhB’s department of Healthcare and of the VUB Faculties of Medicine and Pharmacy and Physical Education and Physiotherapy study alongside each other, and gain practical experience in the Academic Hospital of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The Jette campus also houses the Teacher Training department of EhB. Currently, the possibilities of optimising the collaboration between EhB’s department of Applied Linguistics and VUB’s Faculty of the Arts and Philosophy are under investigation. Lecturers attached to the audiovisual courses of the Rits and the Master Class in Journalism at EhB are already working in close collaboration with the academic staff of the VUB course in Communication Sciences.
Research
Joint research projects have been started in a variety of domains, and the collaboration between the Research Council of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Research Council of the EhB has been intensified.
Social services
The large number of Brussels students represented by the association makes it into the largest partner devoted to providing social services to Dutch-speaking students in Brussels. Via the non-profit association Quartier Latin, this has already led to the creation of the Brusselse Centrale Huisvestingsdienst (Brussels Central Accommodation Service), with more than 3,300 private rooms for students in Brussels that have been awarded a quality label (an important complement to the more than 1,200 rooms in the university’s own student accommodation) as well as free public transport for students of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the EhB on the buses, trams, metro and trains. Students of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Erasmushogeschool Brussel are free to make use of each other’s social and sports facilities. The Students’ Social Sector of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the department of Social Services of the Erasmushogeschool Brussel also work in close collaboration.