A Thousand Slovenian Students to Join Erasmus Programme This Year
Seven Slovenian higher education institutions will send some 1,000 students and over 140 professors to foreign universities within the Erasmus student exchange programme this year, while 700 foreign students are to come to Slovenia, Higher Education Minister Jure Zupan told the press in Ljubljana on Tuesday.
When Slovenia joined the programme in the 1999/2000 academic year, four higher education institutions sent 171 students and 42 professors abroad, while 20 foreign students came to Slovenia.
The number increased to 900 students in the last study year, Zupan said at a press conference marking the 20th anniversary of the Erasmus programme.
Due to the increasing number of participating students the state earmarked about EUR 2.9m for the programme this year, or seven times more than in 2000, said Zupan.
The head of the European Commission's Representation Office in Slovenia Mihela Zupancic meanwhile said that Erasmus was one of the programmes in which the results of European unification were most visible in practice.
After initial doubts by the member states, which were concerned about losing jurisdiction over education, the programme now includes 90% of universities from the participating countries (EU-27, Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Turkey), said Zupancic.
Student organisations played a key role in the process, giving the programme a certain elements of a bottom-up initiative, she added.
About a million and a half students participated in the first twenty years of the Erasmus programme, while the aim of the European Commission is to double the number in the next seven years as the EU budget framework is to earmark EUR 7bn for the programme.
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