Romanian universities face shrinking student enrollment
The number of students enrolled at Romanian universities has been dropping over the past ten years against the demographic decline, a higher number of those choosing to study abroad and a lower number of high school graduates overall. In three years’ time some local universities might be left without students, Ecaterina Andronescu, the education minister, warned.
“We need to find solutions. I don’t think we will have more than 60,000 – 70,000 high school graduates in three years’ time. What will happen to our universities?” the minister asked.
In 2003, 4.3 million students were enrolled in pre-university education, while today only 2.65 million are, according to data quoted by the minister. “Out of the 150,000 pupils that sat the eighth grade evaluation in 2018, 55,000, namely 36%, had grades lower than 5. I don’t think any of you imagines that out of the 55,000 we can have high school graduates with a Baccalaureate diploma, and count on them that they will opt to attend university,” the minister said, quoted by Info-sud-est.ro.
In the Romanian school system, grades are given on a scale from 1 to 10, where 5 is the minimum passing grade. The Baccalaureate is the high school graduation exam.
If in 2009 170,000 students graduated from high school, in 2018 their number went down to 86,000. Of these, some 10% decided to go study abroad. A total of 383,000 students started the 2018 – 2019 university year, Stiri.tvr.ro reported.
One solution would be to enroll foreign students, the minister said.
Over 20,000 foreign students currently learn at universities in Romania. Most of them are enrolled in Medicine and Automatic Control & Computer Science departments.
Several Romanian universities offer study programs in English, among them Medicine and Pharmacy University in Târgu Mureş. The university offers a BA program of Medicine in English and, beginning with the 2019-2020 academic year, it will have a department in Hamburg, Germany, where classes will be taught also in English.
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