What Erasmus+ actually covers — and the assumption that costs students a whole degree

Harry, from a school in Alicante, came to my office in March convinced he had it sorted.

He was going to study his whole degree in Valencia.

Through Erasmus.

He said it like it was a settled thing.

I asked him who had told him that.

Nobody, it turned out. He'd just absorbed it. Older kids talked about Erasmus. His cousin did Erasmus. The word floated around the corridors like it meant "the way you go and study in Spain."

It doesn't.

That's the mistake.

Erasmus+ is an exchange programme.

Not a route to a foreign degree.

It's a European scheme that lets students who are already enrolled at a home university spend a term or a year at a partner university abroad, with the credits counting back home.

Read that again.

Already enrolled.

The whole thing depends on you having a place somewhere first. Erasmus is the bridge between two universities. It is not the thing that gets you into one.

So a British student sitting A-levels in Spain, hoping to do a full Spanish degree, cannot use Erasmus+ to get there.

There is no place to bridge from.

Harry didn't know that.

Neither do a lot of the students who walk through my door with the word already in their heads.

Here's what Erasmus+ does cover, when it applies.

It covers a period abroad. A grant that helps with living costs. A recognised set of credits that transfer back to your home institution. Structure, support, an established relationship between two universities that already trust each other.

That's real, and it's good.

But it covers a student who has a home base.

What it doesn't cover is the thing Harry actually wanted.

It doesn't get you admitted to a Spanish university.

It doesn't replace the acreditación from the UNED.

It doesn't calculate your grade, or count your subjects, or open the application to study medicine in Madrid or law in Sevilla.

It doesn't turn a foreign school-leaver into a first-year Spanish undergraduate.

The stakes here are quiet but heavy.

A student who believes Erasmus is their entry route does nothing that a real entry route requires. No credential. No grade calculation. No application through the proper channel.

They wait.

And by the time they realise the word meant something else entirely, the deadlines that mattered have gone.

I've seen a student lose a year to this. One word, half understood, holding the place where a plan should have been.

Erasmus+ is a wonderful thing for the student it's built for.

The one already inside the system.

Harry wasn't inside yet.

That was the whole problem, and nobody had told him there was a door before the bridge.