European perspective
Protection should not depend on
We work across the European Higher Education Area, comparing how national and institutional rules protect students — without ranking them.
Scope
The European Higher Education Area
The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) grew out of the Bologna Process, in which European governments agreed to make their higher-education systems more compatible. It includes every EU Member State and many other European countries. Students increasingly study, research and move between these systems — but the rules that protect them when something goes wrong remain national, and often institutional.
Our Statute sets this as our territory: StudentSafe Europe works in Croatia and abroad, with particular focus on the EHEA, including the EU Member States and other EHEA countries, and where needed other European higher-education systems.Statute, Art. 3
We work primarily in English so that research, methodology and findings can be read across borders. Documents that Croatian law requires in Croatian are prepared in Croatian.Art. 5
Method
A comparative approach that respects difference.
Two layers, read separately
National law sets a floor; each institution’s statute, regulations and codes build on it. We record each layer on its own, so a gap in one is not hidden by the other.
Original sources
We read rules in the language they were adopted in and cite the official publication. Translations are working aids, marked as such.
One set of criteria
Every system is read against the same StudentSafe Standard criteria, so findings are comparable without pretending systems are identical.
Context, not uniformity
A safeguard can be delivered by different bodies in different systems — an ombudsperson in one, an appeal commission in another. We look for the function, not a particular institution.
Compare, never rank
We publish no league table and no overall score. Comparison shows where a safeguard is missing or strong; it does not make one country “better”.
Unknown stays unknown
A country we have not researched is marked not researched. That is a statement about our work, never about its students’ protection.
Coverage today
Where we have started.
The research currently covers the 27 EU Member States as a first frame, each with its own record. Findings exist for Croatia — our methodology test — and they are still provisional. Every other country is shown as not researched.
Extending to the wider EHEA depends on reviewers who can read each system’s rules in the original language. If that is you, see how to contribute.
Policy
From comparison to common minimums.
One statutory objective is to improve comparable minimum standards of student protection across the EHEA, while respecting differences between national legal and institutional systems.Art. 9 Our policy positions on how that could happen — through quality assurance and public monitoring — are argued from the evidence and published separately from it.
We are not affiliated with the EHEA, the Bologna Follow-Up Group, the European Union or any national authority, and nothing here is an official position of those bodies.