Student Council

The social dimension of student exchange is a burning issue in the context of the Bologna process and one of the Student Council priorities from its creation on. Crafting a concrete approach to addressing issues of accessibility to international sojourns is a logical consequence of CE's policy of facilitating participation regardless of the social-economic background of each student.

The Student Council elaborated on this matter already in 2005, when a concrete proposal of a differentiated grant system was put forward for the Erasmus grant system. This is the gist of the policy paper "Attaining social fairness in student mobity", that can be read here.

This proved to be a seminal discussion for the establishment of the Bologna Meets Lisbon project, namely the combination of studying and working abroad. Indeed, a lot of students combine studying and working in their home universities in order to be able to finance their studies, this additional income is usually lost when going abroad. As the Erasmus grant covers the difference of costs when going abroad, this additional source of income should also be provided to students when going abroad. More information can e found here.

More background information on this topic can be found in the article "The unbearable costs of studying abroad" (May 2006).