Government to withdraw Bill amending Law on Higher Education

The Government of Serbia will today make the decision to withdraw the Bill amending the Law on Higher Education.

The prime minister of Serbia, Milos Vucevic, said that the decision would be made “due to unprecedented pressure and blackmail from the University’s management.”

– Unfortunately, there are people who do not want our children to study at foreign universities in Serbia, not abroad. Regardless of all the pressures, we will continue to fight and our country will be a country of development and progress, in which our children will have the opportunity to freely choose to be educated where they want and to stay in their homeland – Vucevic said, as announced on the website of the Government of Serbia.

Let us remind that, in mid-November, said bill arrived to the National Assembly of Serbia, paving the road for the arrival of foreign higher education institutions to Serbia. As it was said unofficially for the Danas daily at the time, the amendments would enable foreign universities to get permits to work without being accredited in Serbia, which would bypass the National Accreditation Entity of Serbia. Another new feature is that the state would co-finance the scholarships for students from Serbia who would study at these outposts of foreign universities in Serbia, which has so far not been the case when it comes to local private universities and faculties.

This has caused quite a stir in the public, because there is the question of whether this discriminates local faculties or amounts to healthy competition. The minister of education of Serbia, Slavica Djukic Dejanovic, said for RTS that the adoption of the bill would improve the possibility of higher education at the highest level being available to a larger number of people from Serbia. She denied that foreign faculties would be financed from the state budget.

Former education minister Srdjan Verbic estimated in a statement for TV Insajder that the arrival of foreign universities to Serbia would jeopardize higher education institutions, because those would be mostly “second or third tier” faculties.

Vlada Republike Srbije

Miloš Vučević

Slavica Đukić Dejanović

Srđan Verbić

Bill amending the Law on Higher Education

Law on Higher Education

foreign faculties in Serbia