The Minister of Education gives a very important official signal for Romania in this period, and this is to talk about what it means for our country at the moment what is offered through the PNRR in terms of funding for universities, and the money that can be accessed .
The Minister of Education says that the universities must take advantage of the opportunities that are offered within the framework of European funding in order to be able to implement their plans, separately talking about the money allocated for students and about the dual education that comes as a first for Romania now.
"The ministry, and the minister will say, should not have any say in choosing the rector of a university. There are situations in the last elections of 2020 in which there were rectors in office who could run, and they did not run because they knew that their university communities would no longer elect them. There are many other things related to universal autonomy and funding.
There will be more opportunities, but I congratulate the 4 Iasi universities that obtained funding. Through PNRR, we assumed at least 60 universities. On the last day of project submission, at 16:00 p.m., we had 59 applications. It is difficult with 59 applications to have 60 winning projects.
From the unsophisticated side of things, the negotiation with STS, the Ministry of Investments, we managed to extend the call by 4 hours to have 61 winning projects for the digitization of university processes. Otherwise, if we did not fulfill this minimum, and the fulfillment was done at the limit, at the numerical and time limit, we would all have lost, including the 59 universities that signed up.
I would like it to be a signal for the consolidation and maturity of Romanian universities. When there are opportunities, they must be capitalized. Regarding financing, I want to say that the draft law provides for a minimum of 300 LEi per month per budgetary student. An increase of 50%, and this is provided along with the financing of the National Program for the Reduction of University Dropouts.
On the part of connecting to the socio-economic environment, we have dual education organized at the university level for the first time. We have the opportunity to finance the 16 dual education campuses where the universities are entitled to aspire to the role of leader in a partnership whose minimum size is a university, a pre-university education unit, an economic operator and a territorial administrative unit. To stimulate process, we have provided a 30% extra funding in relation to the same funding per student made in the classic system."
