"Speak up for those who cannot find shelter"
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According to Minister of Youth and Sports Mehmet Muharrem Kasapoğlu, 838,272 university students made an application for a student grant or loan for the 2021-2022 school year. Following an examination based on the information received from 11 public institutions, 180,000 students who have entered the system for the first time have been allocated a student grant. The rest of the applicants will be given student loans.
According to the Minister, while 150,000 students were given student grants in the previous years, this number has been increased by 30,000 to 180,000 thousand people for the first time.
34,200 students doing a two-year degree, 144 thousand students doing a BA degree, 350 thousand students doing an MA degree and 450 PhD candidates will be given the grants, according to the Minster.
The Minister has announced the allocation of student loans and grants on his Instagram account. However, the announcement has caused deep disappointment in students, who were waiting for the results.
Several students, especially the ones found eligible for neither a student loan nor a grant, have expressed their criticisms on social media.
The students' messages have shown that the Minister's implication of 'everyone not given a grant is given a loan' does not reflect the truth.
While Minister Kasapoğlu has stated that "150,000 of the 838,272 applicants will be given grants and the rest will be given student loans", several students who have criticized him on social media have indicated that they will be given neither of them, which also shows that the implied number of student loan recipients is well below the indicated number of 600,000.
1 out of every 10 could get a loan, grant
According to the statistics of the Council of Higher Education (YÖK), the total number of students in higher education was 8,240,997 in Turkey in the 2020-2021 school year. While the Minister of Youth and Sports "broke the good news" that the number of students to receive student loans or grants has increased this year, this implied number of 838,272 students still account for one tenth of the total number of students. The rest do not have any public support apart from their families' limited means.
According to a survey conducted in Germany, the number of students who received public support as per the Federal Law on Education Support was 16 percent. As for the five Scandinavian countries (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Iceland), 1.3 million of their 5 million population in total is getting an education and a vast majority of them continue their education with full or half state loan or grant. It is an important element of their social security system that higher education is free of charge and students are supported. (AEK/SD)
