From Stephenson’s Rocket engine to the Large Hadron Collider in CERN Switzerland, Europe has a long and distinguished history of great engineering and technological achievement. Equally impressive are its academic institutions which continue to lead the way in both traditional spheres like civil and mechanical engineering as well as in newer fields such as electro-technology or computer engineering. Both the QS rankings and the Times Higher Education 2015-2016 World University Rankings see several European Higher Education institutions amongst the World’s best – the latter placing the University of Cambridge (4), University of Oxford (6), ETH Zurich (8), Imperial College London (9) all in the Top Ten for Engineering and Technology.
Other world-leading European institutions include the Delft University of Technology (19) in the Netherlands, Germany’s Technische Universitat Munchen (27), Belgium’s KU Leuven (28), Ecole Polytechnique (37) in France, the KTH Royal Institute of Technology (42) in Sweden– all of which make the THE World Top 50 in this category. Europe also offers high standard English-taught undergraduate and post-graduate qualifications and specialist courses in this category at many other European HEIs - including at several EHEVF 2016 participants.
These include Poland’s Wrocław University of Technology, where 10% of foreign students are from India, Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia which offers 18 English-taught Master’s programmes including in engineering, technology, and ICT;and in Vilnius Gediminas Technical University in Lithuania, which is offering new Master’s degree programmes for international students in Structural Engineering, Architecture, and Electronics Engineering. Several European countries are already very popular with Indian and South Asian International students studying Engineering and Technology – including the UK, Germany and France. For example, of the 9,600 Indian International students studying in Germany in 2013-2014, over 50% (4946) studied Engineering Sciences, the most popular choices being TH Aachen, TU Chemnitz and the internationally respected TU Munchen. It’s a similar story in France, where a large percentage of Indian International students there study Engineering and technology – perhaps due in part to the French technical institutes close similarity to Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs).