Romanian universities are losing more and more students

The number of Romanian students continues to decrease from year to year. Only in recent years, higher education in Romania has lost thousands of students who went abroad. Romanian faculties disappear from international charts, while young people leave in search of better conditions and other employment prospects.

This year almost 450,000 students start university in the state and private sector from the first data centralized at the Ministry of Education. In the last academic year, 2022-2023, more than 538,000 students were enrolled in higher education, a number of more than 15,000 less than in 2021-2022, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics.

So, from the first data, it seems that this year we have another decrease in the number of students. The fact that fewer and fewer young people are going to college is not the only problem with the system. In higher education, in 2022 the number of graduates with a diploma was only 125.6 thousand students.

According to Eurostat, in 2022, the lowest shares of people with higher education were observed in Romania and Italy, where the proportion of those with higher education was 30%, an indicator well below the EU average which stands at 40.3% and which placed us in last place.

Preferred universities in Romania in 2021: business, administration and law, engineering, production and construction

In Romania, in 2021 the majority of students chose to study in business, administration and law, engineering, manufacturing and construction. However, these studies do not guarantee success and insertion on the labor market. The generation of 2021 entering the faculty would find out from a report by the University of Bucharest that most of the graduates who made it to the faculty did not work in the fields studied. For business and administration graduates, only 39% were employed in their field. In the case of law graduates, the percentage was only 25%, and the Faculty of Political Sciences produced only 15% graduates employed in the field they studied.

According to the World Bank, in Romania, there are significant skills mismatches, with a large proportion of people with tertiary education either overeducated for their occupations or employed in a sector that does not match their field of education.

In 2022, almost 36,000 Romanian students were studying abroad. Thus, one in 15 young Romanians left across the borders.