The Greek Ministry has decided to reduce the number of universities. The issue is so serious that Greece has little universities. There are 40 for a country of 11 million people. Education Minister Costas Arvanitopoulos argues that decisions to need to reduce costs. According to the Ministry assurances modernization of higher education institutions network will be supported by the new law and will lead to a reduction in maintenance costs and better management of these institutions.
After all, the main mechanism for modernization will be fusion of different universities, what meets with the counter university employees and students. Another problem is the unclear situation private universities whose future is still not certain and will depend on parliamentary corrections.
It is worth noticing that, until recently, private institutions were not considered to higher education in Greece (against the law of the European Union), more importantly, many of the private universities have better results than public universities.
Recently became known about the problems related with the financing of the ERASMUS program. It turns out that only the end of December 2012, students are confident of grants under the Erasmus program. For the first semester, the European Commission has already transferred 99.13% of the required funds for the program, but the lack of € 90 million to finance the second semester students travel abroad.The European Commission ensures that the problem will be solved, however large numbers of students and student organizations are worried that these problems will decrease the number of applications of students to attend in the program. In october The European Commission wants to present the solution of the problem, the final decision be known at the end of 2012.
It is not excluded that in order to ensure the future of the Erasmus program, and many other projects, the EU should increase the budget of the Union. Unfortunately, already seven countries have refused to increase the budget for the year 2013 by 6.8% (~ 100 billion €), which threatening the future of many EU programs. These countries are Austria, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden.
