The research project addresses the question how the expansion and diversification of higher education relates to characteristics, such as openness and inclusion. It concentrates on the legal mechanisms for the provision of financial support (grants) to university students in Bulgaria and Germany, and explores the relevance of university fees for securing or preventing the access of wider social strata to education. While Bulgaria has recently adopted a law for students' credits, the latter's mechanism of implementation has not been developed yet. Hence, a controversy emerges between the legal and everyday practice, which results into low trust in law.

The project aims to examine the effects of legislation on educational motivation, and focuses on its influence on young people's individual decisions and strategies. In addition, the proposed research attempts to analyse the normative regulations in education from a gender perspective. It hopes to question the routine practice of setting gender quotas for enrollment in academia, as some disciplines of usually strong female preference, preschool teachers, nurses, librarians), do not grant an university degree.

The project is designed on a case-oriented, comparative research basis. The focus falls on how strongly organisational variations across countries, and between Bulgaria and Germany in particular, affect the relation between social class and personal achievement in education.