The UkraStud project has moved from listening to drafting. Seven focus groups, conducted across five countries between January and April 2026 with 35 university staff, have been analysed and cross-referenced, and the findings are now being turned into a structured set of recommendations for three different audiences: universities, national regulators, and the donor organisations that fund this kind of work.
One finding sits above all the others. Language doesn’t function as a single barrier in this research. It shows up as four separate ones, each requiring its own fix: the language of the classroom itself, the language of administrative systems, the language needed to access services like counselling, and the language required to compete for a job. Universities that treat language support as a single free course tend to solve none of the four.
Bureaucracy was the second recurring theme in every single session, though its shape varies by country: residence permits and housing in Italy, an administrative portal available mostly in Croatian in Zagreb, insurance and banking in Romania and Turkey, martial-law-related registration complications in Ukraine. Researchers also identified how these problems compound each other. A student who doesn’t speak the local language well enough struggles academically, has fewer social contacts, can’t access psychological support in a language that works for them, and can’t find legal employment. Financial instability adds stress. Stress makes it harder to learn the language in the first place. The loop closes on itself, and a fix aimed at just one link tends not to hold.
For universities, the recommendations are grouped by timeline. Immediately: assign a mentor before a student’s first day, not after arrival, and translate the digital platforms students actually have to use to register for exams or submit documents, at least into English. Within six to eighteen months: give mentoring roles formal status with a defined workload, introduce discipline-specific language courses rather than generic ones, and build actual partnerships with employers willing to hire international students. Longer term: collect anonymous feedback from international students twice a semester, and build intercultural content into the everyday curriculum rather than a once-a-year diversity event.
The report’s clearest institutional recommendation is also its simplest: a mentoring system that depends on one person’s goodwill is not a system. Universities need to formally define the role, the workload, and the recognition attached to it before it can scale.
Two further sets of recommendations go beyond what any single university can fix alone. For national regulators, the report calls for minimum standards covering mentoring support, psychological service access, and digital accessibility, plus specific recognition for institutions like IEU Kyiv, which are supporting incoming international students and operating under wartime conditions at the same time, without additional funding for either role. For donor organisations and NGOs, the recommendation is to fund the things that are cheap to run but hard for a single university to start alone: peer mentoring and buddy schemes, language-adapted counselling, and a shared platform where universities in different countries can actually compare notes.
The guides drawing on this research, on social inclusion, on employment, and on psychological well-being, are currently being piloted with 36 mentor-student pairs across the partner universities. Final versions, revised using evidence from the pilot, are due in six languages at ukrastud.eu in autumn 2026.
