PROCEED: Turning the European Degree into a reality
on the July 31, 2026
PROCEED, as a selected Erasmus+ European Degree Exploratory Action project, will open the way towards a fully-fledged European Plurinational Degree in Engineering: a degree built across national systems, underpinned by robust quality assurance, and designed to create meaningful academic and professional opportunities for students throughout Europe.
Using the European Degree initiative momentum, PROCEED will move from shared principles and recognition frameworks towards a qualification that can operate in practice across several national systems.
Such a degree should do more than acknowledge a European learning experience, and reach beyond a small group of exceptionnally mobile students. It should allow students to study, graduate, continue their education and build their careers across Europe with clearer rights, greater recognition and fewer administrative barriers.
The European Plurinational Degree in Engineering developed through PROCEED will be:
- Scalable, so that it can progressively extend to entire programmes and cohorts;
- Inclusive by design, so that access to a European education does not depend on a student’s financial, personal or social capacity to undertake exceptional mobility;
- Academically demanding, firmly grounded in the standards, responsibilities and public trust associated with engineering education;
- Transferable, so that the approaches developed can serve institutions, disciplines and students well beyond the consortium and the duration of the project.
Europe needs more engineers able to work across disciplines, languages and borders. It also needs qualifications and institutional frameworks that reflect the European scale of its industries, research, innovation and societal challenges.
PROCEED will therefore work simultaneously on academic programmes, engineering-specific quality criteria, recognition mechanisms and the legal pathways required to make a plurinational degree possible in practice.
This work will be carried out hand in hand with quality assurance agencies, national ministries, higher education institutions both within and beyond European university alliances, student representatives, professional organisations and other key stakeholders.
None of these actors can create a genuine European degree alone. Progress will depend on their ability to combine academic ambition, legal feasibility, quality assurance, institutional responsibility and the needs of students and society.
This is why PROCEED brings together 15 higher education institutions from six countries, partners from the EUt+, ECIU and EELISA alliances, universities outside these alliances, national authorities, quality assurance bodies, student representatives and European professional organisations.
Our shared ambition is clear: to open the way to a genuine European degree that creates new rights and opportunities for students, built to work at scale, and designed for all.
Now, we proceed.
Driven by the secretariat general of EUt+, in collaboration with the EELISA European University and ECIU alliances, this collaborative effort, brings together the complementary expertise of each HEI, here Université de Technologie de Troyes, École nationale des ponts et chaussées, PSL Research University, INSA Rouen, INSA Lyon - Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon, Università degli Studi di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale, Scuola Normale Superiore, Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Technical University of Cluj Napoca, University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest, Linköping University, RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau, Universität Passau and associated project partners that include quality assurance agenciesin France (Commission des titres d'ingénieur), in Spain (ANECA, Fundación para el Conocimiento madri+d, and AQU Catalunya), in Romania (ARACIS), in Italy (ANVUR), in the Netherlands and Flanders (NVAO) as well as EQAR - European Quality Assurance Register and ENAEE (European Network for the Accreditation of Engineering Education); national government bodies, such as the Ministère de l'Enseignement supérieur, de la Recherche et de l'Espace, the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain, the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research, the Ministry of Education - Romania; student representation through the European Students' Union (ESU); professional bodies, such as EUCEET, European Civil Engineering Education and Training, CDEFI - Conférence des directeurs des écoles françaises d'ingénieurs, as well as Università di Trento and Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna.