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From time immemorial, Wallonia has made its contribution to the construction of Western civilization. Indeed, many thinkers have sojourned in our land and contributed towards the spread and development of knowledge.

There have been abbeys in Wallonia since the seventh century. The different abbeys in this region (Gembloux, Stavelot, Lobbes, Orval, Liège, etc.) have been real intellectual centres where culture has developed and where an atmosphere of intellectual effervescence has been fostered. These places of worship were also centres where scholars excelled in science, mathematics, goldsmithery, architecture and letters. Of course, even in the 13th century there was an exodus to Paris, and many doctors in the universities of the French capital came from our regions.

Not to be outdone, Wallonia has in its time also been a fertile land for the creation of universities. The first Belgian university was founded in 1425 by Pope Martin V (in the Middle Ages, only the Pope was vested with the authority to order the founding of a university). In the 16th century, the University of Louvain was home to Erasmus, Vesalius, Mercator and others. In fact, the University itself flourished not only in terms of the number of scholars but also in terms of its intellectual influence.
The State University of Liège, which was founded in 1817, rapidly gained international recognition. In the early 1960s, as the number of students was constantly increasing, the University decided to move to Sart Tilman, where new faculties and new laboratories were built. Over time other institutions were granted the status of universities: in 1831, the Facultés Notre-Dame de la Paix were founded in Namur; in 1834, the Catholic University of Louvain, which had been suppressed in the wake of the French Revolution, was reopened; and in 1860, the Faculty of Agricultural Science was founded in Gembloux.

However, in the 20th century a strong regional awareness was to emerge in Flanders which would transform the academic world. The University of Gent underwent 'Flemishization' in 1928. Linguistic parity was established for the management boards of the FNRS and other research centres. In the years that followed, courses in the Dutch language were put on the curriculum of the Law Faculty of the ULB (Free University of Brussels). By 1955, this partitioning spread to all faculties, and in 1970 the Dutch-speaking Free University of Brussels was founded.
This linguistic partitioning led to an important event in 1968. In the University of Louvain, which had been bilingual since the early 20th century, the tension was mounting. Suddenly, there were strident calls for the French-speaking students to be expelled ("Walen buiten!"). This created a split in the Belgian academic world. The Flemish kept Louvain, while the French-speaking authorities set up the Catholic University of Louvain, with the Faculty of Medicine in Woluwé and other faculties in Louvain-la-Neuve.

Our region offers high-quality education that is designed to accommodate the wide variety of Belgian and foreign students who attend our schools and universities and to fully meet their expectations. As for higher education, Wallonia currently has no fewer than 130 schools and 9 university-level institutions!

• University of Louvain-la-Neuve, UCL
• Free University of Brussels, ULB
• University of Liège, Ulg
• University of Mons-Hainaut, UMH
• Polytechnic Faculty of Mons, FPMS
• Gembloux Faculty of Agricultural Sciences
• Catholic University Faculties of Mons, FUCAM
• University Faculties of Notre-Dame de la Paix in Namur, FUNDP
• Luxembourg University Foundation, FUL