The project “Internationalisation of educational services of higher education institutions” of the Ministry of Education, Religious Affairs and Sport is launched. It will be supported with a budget of 62 million euros.

The Ministry of Education has issued a call to the Special Research Funding Accounts (SRAs) of the country’s higher education institutions (HEIs) to submit funding proposals for the “Internationalisation of educational services of HEIs”, with a budget of 62 million euros.

More specifically, the public expenditure budget of the action, which totals 62 million euros, includes the amount of 50 million euros, which comes from the Recovery and Resilience Fund for the period 2022-2025. For this Action, the contribution of the National MFF is estimated at 12,000,000 euros and concerns the coverage of the amount corresponding to the VAT.

The implementation of the Action is part of the Reform “Promotion of quality, innovation and extroversion in universities” of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan “Greece 2.0” with funding from the European Union-NextGenerationEU.

It is noted that each HEI through the relevant ELKE can submit as many proposals as it wishes, provided that they do not exceed the amount of 15 million euros in total.

Where is the program aimed

The aim of the call is to boost the extroversion of Greek universities by strengthening their cooperation with well-established, prestigious universities abroad.

In particular, the call aims to:

a) to strengthen the educational infrastructure of Greek higher education institutions seeking to organise joint master or dual master programs with distinguished foreign universities in new subjects not currently available, and

b) the creation of new scientific disciplines, which will now be available to candidates.

The conclusion of such educational agreements is expected to achieve the provision of education in subjects for which it is currently necessary for students to go abroad, as certain educational services deemed necessary by the state or specialisation in specific fields are currently not provided by domestic universities or, even if they are provided, this is not done on terms affordable to society as a whole, making it necessary for the state to intervene in order to contract out the provision of these particular subjects.

In this way, it is expected to strengthen the employment of Greek university researchers in areas and subjects where the current market situation does not ensure their competitive attraction, to limit the brain drain of young scientists abroad, while the prospect of the return of distinguished Greek scientists to our country (brain gain) will be significantly enhanced.

Joint postgraduate programs should be innovative, not already provided by public higher education institutions and should be provided on terms that are affordable for society as a whole, ensuring fair and equal access and equal opportunities for all postgraduate students without exception.

It is noted that the operation and strengthening of such Postgraduate Programs of Studies is based on the recent institutional acquis, while the association of Greek public universities with renowned international universities is another step towards the further upgrading of Greece on the global academic map.