/ world today news/ Future doctors and pharmacists protest against the Ministry of Education. The reason is that students are left without Euroscholarships for success.
The problem is that medicine remains outside the list of so-called priority professional areas. According to the parameters announced a week ago, there will be two types of scholarships – for success, which will be given in priority majors, and for special achievements. For success, students will receive an average of BGN 120 per month, and special achievements will receive BGN 600 for the entire semester.
This morning, the leadership of the Ministry of Education and Science is expected to meet with representatives of the student councils to discuss the protest.
On Friday, Education Minister Meglena Kuneva explained that the concept of “priority professional fields” in the Law on Higher Education in no way divides the various specialties into significant and insignificant ones. If I had written the law, I would have used another term such as “problem specialties that need support” instead of “priority”. The problem is that there are very important specialties for our country and for the labor market, for which there are no candidates to study, such as engineers and teachers, explained Kuneva. She specified that the European scholarships were already agreed upon in 2014, when the principles for their distribution were drawn up. Then the student organizations were also spoken to, explaining step by step what this program is, the Deputy Prime Minister pointed out. The granting of European scholarships for the so-called priority specialties is explicitly written in the Higher Education Development Strategy voted almost unanimously in February 2015 by the National Assembly, the adoption of which was one of the conditions for launching the Operational Program “Science and Education for Intelligent Growth”.
Kuneva was adamant that medicine is one of the most important specialties for the country. This can be seen through the state funding, which is one of the highest in the country. She recalled that since 2004 it has more than doubled – from BGN 40 to BGN 88 million. The maintenance of a medical student costs the state over BGN 7,000 per year, while it is BGN 700 for an economics student.
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