Recent research, particularly the 2025 study “Strengthening Europe from the Ground Up? Students’ Perspectives on the European Universities Initiative,” provides a bottom-up look at one of the EU’s most ambitious education projects.
The European Universities Initiative (EUI) aims to create transnational alliances where students can seamlessly study, research, and work across different borders. While the European Commission views this as a “top-down” flagship, this specific study explores whether students actually feel like they are part of a unified European campus. 🇪🇺
1. The Concept of “Everyday Europeanhood” 🌍
A key finding of the 2025 research is that for students, “Europe” is not just a political entity; it is something they “perform” through daily activities. The study categorizes these student experiences into four dimensions:
- Talking Europe: Engaging in multilingual environments and discussing European policy or identity. 🗣️
- Choosing Europe: Actively selecting study paths that involve mobility within an alliance rather than staying in a single national system. 🎒
- Performing Europe: Participating in joint student assemblies, living labs, and cross-border team projects. 🎭
- Consuming Europe: Utilizing shared digital libraries, student cards, and campus resources across multiple countries. 💳
2. Student Governance and Co-Creation 🤝
The research highlights that students are not just “users” of these alliances; they are increasingly “architects.”
- High Representation: Students are involved in the governance of 95% of all alliances. 🏛️
- Voting Rights: Approximately 63% of these alliances grant students full voting rights, allowing them to shape future curricula and mobility rules. 🗳️
- The European Student Assembly (ESA): A direct outcome of this initiative where students from all over Europe meet to draft policy recommendations for the European Commission. 📝
3. Barriers to a “Ground-Up” Reality 🚧
Despite the high level of ambition, students still report significant systemic hurdles that prevent a truly seamless experience:
| Barrier Type | Student Perspective |
| Administrative | Struggle with different academic calendars and credit (ECTS) recognition between partner schools. 🗓️ |
| Financial | Mobility grants (like Erasmus+) often do not cover the full cost of living in expensive “metropolitan cores.” 💶 |
| Communication | Many students are still unaware of the opportunities offered by their university’s alliance due to “information silos.” 📢 |
| Digital Gaps | A lack of interoperable IT systems makes it hard to register for courses at a partner university. 💻 |
4. The “Two-Tier” Risk ⚖️
Recent reviews (2024–2025) warn that the initiative might inadvertently create a “stratification” in European education.
- The Elite Core: Large, research-heavy universities often find it easier to form and fund alliances.
- The Left Behind: Smaller, specialized, or rural institutions may struggle to participate, potentially creating an “elite club” of European universities that excludes a large portion of the student population.
Key Research Insight: For the initiative to truly strengthen Europe “from the ground up,” it must move beyond being a project for a “mobile elite” and become an accessible reality for students with fewer opportunities.
I’ll be guiding you with some questions to help us dive deeper into this topic. To start, should we look at:
- Student Identity: How does participating in an alliance specifically change a student’s sense of “being European”? 🇪🇺
- Joint Degrees: What are the practical challenges students face when trying to obtain a single “European Degree” from multiple universities? 🎓
- Policy vs. Reality: How do students’ grassroots recommendations (like those from the ESA) differ from the top-down goals of the European Commission? 🏛️