Welcome to our Young Generation Policy Briefs series! In this eleventh issue of the series, Enes İçen and Dilara Korkmaz discuss the New EU Visa Path for Turkish University Students.
Executive Summary:
Despite the EU’s commitment to youth mobility and people-to-people engagement, Turkish university students continue to face substantial barriers when seeking short-term access to the Schengen area. Turkish students are processed within a broader short-stay system shaped by concerns over irregular migration, overstaying, asylum claims, and informal entry into labour markets. Documentary burdens, financial costs, uncertainty over appointments, and limited predictability in outcomes make mobility difficult to plan and weaken the EU’s mobility agenda at the point where many young people experience it most directly.
This policy brief argues that the status quo is increasingly difficult to defend, while broader exemption-based reforms remain politically and legally unrealistic under current conditions. It evaluates three policy options and recommends an Ultra-Facilitated Student Visa Pilot led by willing member states. The proposed pilot would create a limited, monitorable, and reversible visa track for students enrolled in accredited Turkish universities. By reducing documentary burdens, improving appointment access, and making visa procedures more predictable within the existing Schengen framework, this option offers the most credible route to more credibility of the EU in one of its core normative agendas.
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Young Generation Policy Brief no. 11:
About the authors:
ENES İÇEN
undergraduate student in Political Science and Public Administration, Istanbul Bilgi University
Enes İçen is an undergraduate student in Political Science and Public Administration at Istanbul Bilgi University in Türkiye. He has worked as a research intern at the European Institute of Istanbul Bilgi University, contributing to academic research, project-related activities, and institutional event coordination. He also supported the organisation of the ValEUs Global Summer School on Multiple Crises and Contestation of EU Values. His academic interests include EU–Türkiye relations, youth mobility, public policy analysis, securitization, critical geopolitics, and qualitative approaches to international politics. His submitted bachelor thesis focuses on geopolitical framing, securitization, and the political conditions under which military force becomes thinkable in foreign policy.
DİLARA KORKMAZ
final-semester International Relations student, Istanbul Bilgi University
Dilara Korkmaz is a final-semester International Relations student at Istanbul Bilgi University in Türkiye. She previously studied at Alice Salomon Hochschule Berlin as an Erasmus exchange student, focusing on diversity studies, migration, and social policy. She has interned at the Turkish National Commission for UNESCO and the Istanbul Bilgi University European Institute, where she gained experience in international cooperation and European affairs. Her academic interests include migration and diaspora studies, European integration, misinformation and disinformation studies, and right-wing populism in contemporary Europe. She is fluent in Turkish and English and is currently developing her German language skills.
ValEUs Young Generation Policy Briefs
Policy briefs are regularly published as part of the Jean Monnet Policy Network “ValEUs”. The project, which is intended to provide a realistic account of EU foreign policy, thus aims to expand the societal dialogue on project results. The policy briefs are written from a student perspective, identifying problems with the self-proclaimed European values and suggesting possible solutions. This first issue presents a guide for students with practical tips on how to write a policy brief. Furthermore, it is an introduction to the following series summarising the central stakes in the proclamation and contestation of European values.
