24/08/2026
For young Europeans growing up between countries, education is increasingly a cross-border experience. ProEduHub, an initiative supporting young Romanians in Belgium and Italy who are considering higher education in Romania, responds to that reality by helping students and families navigate choices that span different education systems, languages and national contexts. It is also an example of a broader development across Europe: while education remains primarily a national competence, mobility and European integration are creating growing demand for cooperation across borders.
What role should the EU play when learning becomes inseparable from mobility, citizenship and democratic participation?
A practical bridge for young Romanians abroad
ProEduHub, an initiative developed by the Romanian consumer organisation InfoCons, is aimed specifically at young Romanians aged 15 to 25 living in Belgium and Italy who are considering higher education in Romania, as well as their families. Running from 1 August to 30 October 2026 with support from Romania’s Department for Romanians Everywhere, the initiative is designed to make reliable information about Romanian higher education easier to access from abroad.
The approach is deliberately practical. ProEduHub brings together an online information platform, telephone guidance, digital outreach and explanatory materials, alongside a pilot involving four Romanian universities: the University of Bucharest, the National University of Science and Technology POLITEHNICA Bucharest, the Bucharest University of Economic Studies and the University of Life Sciences “King Mihai I” from Timișoara. The project has set itself both a broad communication target and a more personal one: reaching a large diaspora audience while directly advising at least 100 young people.
What makes this initiative truly interesting is the problem the project is responding to. Europe’s citizens move across borders, families settle in one Member State while maintaining social, cultural and educational links with another, and young people increasingly make choices within a genuinely European space. Yet the information and institutions that shape those choices remain fragmented along national lines.
For a Romanian teenager growing up in Brussels or Milan, “where should I study?” is not necessarily a domestic question. It can involve different school systems, languages, recognition of qualifications, mobility, family ties and future employment across several countries. Initiatives such as ProEduHub are therefore small examples of a wider reality: European integration is already lived through education, even where education policy itself remains predominantly national.
More information about the initiative is available from InfoCons’ ProEduHub page and in an article written by indegazette.be
Education: a national responsibility with an expanding European dimension
The EU treaties draw that line quite clearly. Education is an area where the Union may support, coordinate and supplement Member State action, but Member States retain responsibility for the content of teaching and the organisation of their education systems. The EU cannot simply harmonise national curricula from Brussels.
Yet that limited legal competence has not prevented a European educational space from gradually emerging. Mobility programmes, university cooperation, mutual recognition, digital learning and common priorities have created forms of coordination that transcend national education systems.
The next frontier may be less about where Europeans study than about what they need to learn in order to function as citizens of a shared political system.
Citizenship education enters the democracy debate
That shift is now visible in the European Commission’s European Democracy Shield. Presented in November 2025, the Shield does not treat democratic resilience only as a question of election security, foreign interference or platform regulation. One of its three pillars focuses on societal resilience and citizens’ engagement, including stronger media and digital literacy, citizenship education in schools and the development of an EU citizenship competence framework.
This matters because it reframes citizenship education from a peripheral educational concern into part of Europe’s democratic infrastructure. If citizens are expected to participate in European elections, distinguish reliable information from manipulation, understand rights that follow them across borders and make use of EU participatory instruments, then knowledge of European democracy becomes more than an optional extra.
Civil society is pushing in the same direction. On 17 July 2026, the Commission registered the European Citizens’ Initiative “All On Board – For your right to citizenship without borders”, promoted by the ECIT Foundation and its partners. Its organisers call for a more tangible form of European citizenship built around three ideas: learning about European rights, values and democratic participation; experiencing Europe through meaningful mobility opportunities; and improving recognition of learning and qualifications across the Union.
While the registration is procedural rather than an endorsement of the initiative by the Commission, its emergence is politically interesting: it reflects a growing appetite to discuss citizenship not simply as a legal status attached to nationality, but as something citizens should be equipped to understand, experience and exercise.
A debate citizens can enter now
The timing is particularly relevant. The European Commission’s Citizens’ Engagement Platform is currently hosting an online debate on Democratic Resilience, open from May to December 2026. The discussion explicitly includes access to reliable information, awareness of citizens’ rights, participation in decision-making, media literacy and the skills needed to engage in democracy in a digital world.
Those contributions will feed into the European Citizens’ Panel on Democratic Resilience, bringing together 150 randomly selected citizens from all 27 Member States. Its first session will take place in Brussels on 18–20 September, followed by an online session on 16–18 October and a final Brussels session on 20–22 November, when participants will develop recommendations for the European Commission.
This is therefore a useful moment to broaden the education debate. The question is not whether Brussels should dictate what happens in national classrooms. It should not, and under the current treaties it cannot. The more interesting question is what knowledge, experiences and civic skills Europeans need if EU citizenship is to mean something in practice.
Perhaps ProEduHub, as a project helping Romanian students navigate university choices might not answer directly that question. But it illustrates why the question keeps returning. Europeans already live across borders. Their education, careers and identities increasingly do too. The democratic structures governing that shared space now need citizens who know how to navigate it.
And this particular debate has an open door. Citizens, educators and civil society organisations can already submit ideas, comment on proposals and contribute to the discussion that will feed into the Citizens’ Panel this autumn.
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