Every October, Europe celebrates Erasmus Days. The children who need it most have never even heard of it.
Somewhere in Romania, in Bulgaria, in one of the places Europe politely calls the edge of the map, there is a boy who has never seen the sea. He is almost eighteen. The furthest he has ever been is the nearest town, once, for about an hour, long enough to eat an ice cream and look at a pizza he could not afford. He has never stood at the bottom of a mountain and looked up. He keeps an old photo of the sea, the kind that has gone soft at the corners, and sometimes he stares at it and tries to imagine how the beach smells. For him, Europe is a rumour. And Erasmus is a fairy tale written for somebody else.
This month, from the 12th to the 17th of October, Europe celebrates Erasmus Days1. Thousands of events. Bright posters. Happy hashtags. Photos of students laughing in cities far from home. All of it is real, and a lot of it is genuinely beautiful. Erasmus is one of the best ideas Europe ever had: the promise that an ordinary young person, from anywhere, can go and see the continent they belong to. I believe in that promise completely. Which is exactly why I want to say the uncomfortable part out loud.
A door can be open and still be almost impossible to find. Opportunity in Europe is not always stolen. Sometimes it is simply filtered, quietly, before it ever reaches the people who need it most. And the filter is made of three things that have nothing to do with how clever or how hard-working a kid is: information, money, and knowing the right people.
Start with information. You cannot just sign your child up for Erasmus. There is no simple form a parent fills in alone. It all runs through schools and approved organisations, so the first thing that decides a child’s chances is whether the adults around them even know the programme exists. A school that has done this before starts from a completely different place than one that never has. The difference is often not talent. It is whether the school around you already knows how the system works. That advantage never shows up on a child’s application. It just decides whether the application is ever written at all. The child from the village did not lose the competition. He was simply never told there was one. Inequality does not always look like a locked gate. Sometimes it just looks like paperwork.
Then there is selection. Even when a school does take part, who actually gets picked? The rules say selection has to be fair, open and written down. But rules on paper and trust in real life are two different things. When a student cannot see the criteria, the whole thing stops feeling like a competition and starts feeling like a decision made somewhere above their head. Because the moment a young person starts believing that connections count for more than criteria, they stop asking whether they can win. They start asking whether they were ever really meant to compete.
Then there is the maze. The problem with Erasmus is not too little information. It is almost the opposite: the information is scattered everywhere, across programme pages, agencies, schools, organisations and databases. If you already know how the machine works, you can find your way around it. If you are a parent meeting it for the first time, in a small town, with no one to ask, it might as well be written in a language you were never taught. The real question is not whether the information exists. It is whether the child who needs it can find the right piece, at the right moment, in a form they can use.
But the part that honestly gets to me is simpler than all of that. Look at the photos from the conferences where these programmes get designed, funded and celebrated. Serious rooms. Serious people. Serious talk about young people. Then ask the obvious question: where are the young people? We are the subject of the meeting. We are just not invited to it. A photo of adults talking about youth is not proof that youth took part. It is proof that adults talked about youth. That sounds like a small thing, until you are the teenager whose life is being discussed in that room. Then it is the whole point.
So let me ask the thing nobody at those tables seems to ask. Who, exactly, is Erasmus for? And maybe the sharper question is even simpler: who is still missing?
Here are the only numbers you need. Erasmus+ is worth about 26.2 billion euros3. It is one of the biggest things the EU pays for. And yet, when the EU surveyed its own youth organisations, about two in three said the programme’s own rules made it harder, not easier, to reach the young people who are hardest to reach. The people whose whole job is to open the door are telling you the door is heavy. That is not proof that Erasmus is failing. It is proof of something more interesting: making a programme bigger is not the same as making it easier to reach.
And this is where it gets uncomfortable, because Europe already knows. Inclusion is not a footnote in Erasmus+. It is one of its four main priorities, with extra money set aside for young people who face money problems, distance, or a harder start in life, and even help for those who, in the programme’s own words, think Erasmus is not for them2. Think about what that admission means. You do not build a special ramp for the people you were already letting in through the front door. You build it for the ones you have been quietly leaving outside. So we are not asking whether Europe knows there is a problem. Europe has written the problem into its own programme. The only question left is whether it has fixed enough of it.
So here is what I would build. One clearer door, not a maze. A single, official European place where any young person or parent can search real Erasmus opportunities, see who can apply, see exactly how people are chosen, and find the organisation responsible. The EU has already proposed a new Erasmus for 2028 to 2034, and the whole argument around it is about making it simpler and more open4. Good. Now make it actually work for the teenager who does not already know where to look. Make fairness something you can check. Publish who gets the funding, who takes part, how they were chosen, and how many came from the groups that were supposed to be the priority. If inclusion really is a priority, it should not only live in the programme guide. It should show up in the data. And a seat for us. No programme built for young people should be designed in a room with no young people in it. Not as decoration for the photo, but as people who get asked, get listened to, and get to say when the emperor has no clothes.
None of this means Erasmus is a lie. Just the opposite. I want more of it. I want it to reach more people, in more places, with fewer invisible walls between the opportunity and the child. The problem was never the idea. The problem is the distance between the idea and the kid it was supposed to be for.
So go back to that boy with the faded photo of a sea he has never smelled. Erasmus was supposed to make Europe feel closer to him. But distance is not only measured in kilometres. It is also measured in information, in money, and in whether anyone ever made you believe the opportunity was meant for you too. Europe can put the door online, pay for the journey, and print the word inclusion in every brochure it owns. None of it matters if the child who needs the opportunity most never finds the door.
And that is the question Erasmus Days should really leave us with. Not how many events we held. Not how many photos we posted. Not how many times we said Europe is open. Just one simple question: who still cannot get in? Because if we cannot answer that, we are not measuring inclusion. We are measuring the party. And a Europe that throws a party for an open door, while some of its children are still standing outside it, has not finished building the Europe it keeps promising them.
Sources
1 Erasmus Days 2026 runs 12–17 October 2026 (the 10th edition). Official site: https://www.erasmusdays.eu/
2 European Commission, Erasmus+ programme priorities — “Inclusion and Diversity”: equal opportunities and access for all, with dedicated support for participants with fewer opportunities: https://erasmus-plus.ec.europa.eu/about-erasmus/programme-priorities
3 Erasmus+ budget of €26.2 billion (2021–2027), and the finding that around two thirds of surveyed youth organisations identified structural barriers in the programme’s rules to reaching those with fewer opportunities — European Youth Forum: https://www.youthforum.org/news/new-report-measures-the-eu-youth-programmes-success-but-not-everyone-benefits
4 European Commission, proposal for the new Erasmus+ programme beyond 2027 (2028–2034): https://erasmus-plus.ec.europa.eu/news/commission-proposes-new-erasmus-beyond-2027