UC Leuven-Limburg is part of the KU Leuven Association which is an official entity regulating the collaboration between a university and one or more university colleges in Flanders, Belgium.

Our  university college  and its predecessors advocate high standards regarding the quality of their key activities in education, research and outreach. Our choice goes to partners with a practice-oriented, innovative and fully international profile.

UC Leuven-Limburg aims to intensify its international partnerships. We continuously search for comparable innovative and ambitious higher education institutions as well as representative organisations. To advance our region and our academic community we have already developed strategic and intense partnerships with FUAS (Finland), Hanze UAS  and Zuyd UAS (Netherlands), and Belgian Campus (South Africa) and are an active partner in networks such as EURASHE or BUSINET. A visualisation of our existing partnerships worldwide can be found here.

Our vision on international partners

We engage in a wide range of activities with our partners. In our new partnerships the institution will cooperate in more research and educational projects with fewer partners. Our vision on international partners is shaped as a piramid. In the lowest tier we find over a 100 partner institutions with whom we work on general student and staff mobility. Higher up, one will find partners with whom we are benchmarking our degree programmes, work on common research projects, or even organising multiple degree programmes. At the top, one finds our strategic partners. Partners at the top are also involved in all activities ranked below.

In this unique model, international cooperation includes but goes beyond the mobility of students and staff. Embedding practice-oriented research in the organisation is one of the strategic priorities of UC Leuven-Limburg. We focus in particular on a strong relation between education and research. We strongly believe that practice-oriented research leads to:

• education of high quality and innovation of the curriculum;
• alumni with research and international competences and an attitude led by curiosity;
• the built-up of expertise and professionalisation of staff members;
• innovation and knowledge valorisation in the community and professional sector.

Some numbers

Our teaching staff consists of a mixture of 1,700 experts from the professional field. A substantial number of the staff are guest lecturers. With almost 200 staff members holding a PhD our institution scores very high among comparable organisations. Just over a quarter of our staff is engaged in research activities. Many of them have close connections to the work field via outreach activities, service to the community, or their part-time job. UC Leuven-Limburg had a turn-over of more than 10 million Euro in research in 2014.

In our Leuven campusses over 14% of our alumni had a mobility abroad of at least one semester. Our Limburg campusses are following closely. Nearly all alumni engaged in a short-term international experience such as an International Week. Almost 200 students are enrolled in a truly international degree programme.