A Patchwork of Financing Complicates Foreign Study When Ivailo Vasilev of Bulgaria was accepted at the London School of Economics two years ago, he calculated that he would need tens of thousands of British pounds that he did not have as a recent university graduate to pay tuition and other costs. So he decided, like countless others, to take out a student loan. It would be more complicated than he expected. He was not eligible for a student loan in Britain because he did not fulfill a three-year residency requirement, but there were few options in his home country. "It's impossible to get a student loan in Bulgaria," Mr. Vasilev, 25, said by telephone from Plovdiv, Bulgaria, where he is now working and still paying off student debt. I did my research in different banks but it turned out there are no real student loans here. In the end, his parents helped him by taking out a regular bank loan. Many graduates looking to continue their education in another European nation struggle to find financing for postgraduate degrees, because they can be more expensive than undergraduate programs and because lending policies vary from country to country. While student loans are a burden for any student, those from Southeastern Europe can have a harder time because they come from poorer countries where lending options are scarce. The few student loans available are designed for those who want to study in their home countries and cannot be transferred. There is no pan-European loan program that supports students who want to get master's degrees abroad. "At the moment in most countries in the E.U., the financial support which is available to students is either not transferrable to another country for a full degree or it's transferable on very limited conditions," said Adam Tyson, the head of Higher Education and Erasmus, the study-abroad program, at the European Commission. The issue is gaining prominence. This month, the European Association for International Education adopted a charter that said: "National student loans and grants should always be portable. Students on grants that cover tuition and expenses while studying abroad should be provided with safeguards against arbitrary withdrawal of their funding. A proposal has been drafted in Brussels for a European Union student loan program that will support those who want to study for a master's degree in another member state. If it is approved, Brussels will offer a guarantee to private banks for student loans of as much as €12,000, or about $15,500, for a yearlong degree program, or €18,000 for a two-year master's program. The budget for the program's guarantee is expected to be €100 million per year. Between the government and banks, there will be a total of €700 million worth of financing, which will be enough to give loans to about 44,000 students. The guarantee is significant, given the number of students who default on loans. The Telegraph newspaper reported this year that, as of April 2011, 45 percent of non-British European students who were supposed to begin repaying loans in Britain "had disappeared or were in arrears." It cited the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills as reporting that total outstanding debt from E.U. borrowers was £47.4 million, or about $76.7 million, at the end of the 2009-2010 school year. The E.U. proposal suggests that a student be given a one-year grace period, as well as a repayment period of 5 to 15 years, with no charge for early payment. The European Parliament is expected to discuss the issue in November. The loan program would begin in 2014. But for now, most government loans and grants in Europe are for students who wish to study domestically. According to an E.U. report, there were about 1.5 million foreign students in Europe in 2006-2007. Of those, about 600,000 were European nationals studying outside their home countries. A 2011 survey by Eurobarometer, a series of European Commission public opinion polls, found that 65 percent of students studying or training abroad financed the stays with private means; 18 percent received national or regional loans or grants.