Month: February 2023

The Hungarian Foreign Minister, Péter Szijjártó and Abdellatif Miraoui, the Moroccan Education Minister have signed an agreement which ensures an increasing number of grants for Moroccan students, as the number of students from this country increases rapidly across Hungarian universities. According to MTI, the new agreement includes increasing grants for students from Moroccan from 150 to 165 during the 2023 and 2025 period. In addition, Hungarian universities plan to send teachers to hold classes at Moroccan universities, Genefconsults reports. During this meeting, Szijjártó noted that in the last year, a total of 1,151 students from Morocco have enrolled in Hungarian higher education institutions, marking the highest record of these students recorded so far. This also indicates that the standard of Hungarian higher education is getting recognised internationally, as the Minister emphasised. He also pointed out how the war in Ukraine has affected both, Morocco and Hungary, as most of the wheat imports come from Ukraine and Russia. He also noted that like Hungary, Morocco wants to restore peace with Ukraine as soon as possible. The Hungarian minister also mentioned illegal migration, as one of the challenges that have to be addressed throughout 2021, noting that Morocco has an important role to play in this situation. “The experience we have gained over the past six to seven years is that migration pressure eases if there is stability in North Africa. This is why we highly esteem stable countries in the region, a line of defence for Europe, Morocco among them,” the foreign minister said. Hungary also intends to continue helping as its embassy serves as a liaison between Morocco and NATO this year as well as continued development of cooperation as bilateral trade increases by 16 per cent, to a record of $300 million. Hungary offers free of charge education for its citizens, while in 2020, the budgetary institutions’ total expenditure reached 1.8 trillion forints, representing 3.8 per cent of the country’s national budget. At the same time, consumer spending on education reached $1.3 billion and increased to a further $1.5 billion in 2021.

International students, in addition to graduates, in Estonia have contributed €22.4 million in taxes to the Estonian economy in the last academic year ending in 2022, Statistics Estonia reveals.According to an analysis by the authority also commissioned by the Estonian Education and Youth Board, international students alone contributed €14 million, while those that decided to stay in Estonia and take employment paid over €8 million during the same time, Genefconsults.com reports. Kadri Rootalu, the data scientist at Statistics Estonia, said that more than half of international students, representing 2,400 of those, engaged in paid employment in the country for at least one day during their academic year. “It should also be pointed out that international students do not (do paid) work for just a few days a year. Both local and international students, who work, are usually employed for longer periods. That is, for more than 90 days,” explained Rootalu. Furthermore, international students paid €9.4 million in social tax and another €4.6 million in income tax, while the group of students most likely to take up paid employment during their studies as those in the fields of information and communication technologies (ICT), manufacturing, engineering, business, administration, construction, and the law did. As a result, the proportion of international graduates that stay and work in Estonia has surged in recent years, with the majority of graduates from other countries who stay in Estonia remaining in the capital city – Tallinn, where they also take up employment. “One of our aims has been to have more motivated international graduates who stay in Estonia after graduation and offer their expertise on the Estonian labor market. However, the state should also try to find ways to ensure all Estonia’s counties benefit from the contributions of international graduates,” Eero Loonurm, head of the Study in Estonia program at the Estonian Education and Youth Board, said. She also noted that the main enterprises where international students work are located in Tallinn as well as the rest of Harju county. The Estonian government has been actively engaged in increasing the number of international students, as it aims for this category to represent ten per cent of the population in the country by 2025. As of the academic year 2020/2021, a total of 5,856 international students were enrolled in Estonian universities, which represents 11 per cent of the total student population in the country. The main source markets include Finland, Russia, Ukraine, and Latvia.