site.bta 20,000-Plus Bulgarian Students Benefited from EU Erasmus Programme

20,000-Plus Bulgarian Students Benefited from EU Erasmus Programme

Sofia, February 21 (BTA) - More than 20,000 university students and over 13,000 faculty and administrative staff of Bulgarian higher schools have taken advantage of the educational mobility opportunities offered by the EU programme for education, training, youth and sport Erasmus, caretaker Education and Science Minister Nikolai Denkov said here on Tuesday. He was addressing a ceremony marking the 30th anniversary of the Programme, which is celebrated EU-wide in 2017.

In Bulgaria, Erasmus started in 1999, and the participants in it have so far increased manifold. Just ten higher schools joined it during the first year, and now their number has reached 47. At the beginning, only 134 undergraduates availed themselves of the opportunity to study abroad under the Programme, and they number 2,450 during the current academic year.

Mobility of teaching staff started in Bulgaria with 142 instructors, and now 877 instructors benefit from this option. A total of 512 members of both teaching and non-teaching staff undergo Erasmus training this year.

Bulgarian students opted for training at universities in Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, the UK, Poland and Greece, and in almost all fields, with preference for engineering, business administration and management, economics, mathematics, computer science and social sciences.

Denkov is confident that the Erasmus Programme will continue after 2020. He recalled that the Programme is based on the Bologna Process, which is an important factor of expanding higher-education mobility and internationalization. That is why the new Erasmus+ Programme will continue to support international partnerships between institutions and organizations in education, training and youth and to promote cooperation between education and the economy.