Are there many universities in Bulgaria?

Recently, a professor from Maastricht University presented a report in which he recommended that the number of higher education institutions in Bulgaria be reduced to 10, because “this was the European practice.” The argument is that until this reform is carried out, any increase in funding for science will not achieve the desired result, and that only through such a reform can Bulgarian universities become competitive with European ones.

What does the data show?

First, European practice is not like that at all. Second, it is a complete lie that reducing competition will increase quality. However, this does not prevent the popular opinion in Bulgaria from being that “we have many universities”. Few calculations. According to the EU website, there are 3,300 higher education institutions in the union. If we roughly assume that there is a population of 511 million people, this works out to be one higher education institution per 154,000 people. This is much less than the lie that there were “1 in a million”.

In Bulgaria there are 51 higher education institutions (according to the register of the Ministry of Education and Science ) for a population of 7,100,000. So we have 1 higher education institution for 140,000 people. Not too far from the real European practice, right?

But that's not all. It's good not to compare ourselves only with the EU, but also to look at other good practices. Let's look at the leader in the number of higher education institutions in the top 100 universities in the world - the USA has 42, while the EU has a total of 31 in the ranking. According to the website of the National Center for Education Statistics, there are 4,724 higher education institutions in the USA with a population of 325 million. This makes 1 university per 69,000 people, rounded up.

That is , the US has over TWICE as many universities per capita as Bulgaria and the EU average.

Now, someone will naturally say that there are drastic differences in the size of universities. Yes, that's true - three small universities may educate fewer people than one large one. But there are statistics for that too:

• In the EU, the ratio is 1 student per 41 population;
• In Bulgaria, the ratio is 1 student per 30 population (according to NSI data);
• In the US, the ratio is 1 student per 16 population.

In other words, we are between the EU and the US, but closer to the EU. This is probably normal.

The problem is not in numbers, but in the lack of competition

But that's not all. In the US, about 83% of scientists work in the private sector. In the EU, we're talking about 50%. This is one of the main reasons why the US is much ahead in the field of science and education compared to the EU - they are much more frugal in terms of government spending, while at the same time allowing their educational institutions to have much more income.

Here is the key to the problems in Bulgaria. Our universities are not many – their problem is that they are mostly state-owned! Out of all 51 universities, only 13 are private. Add the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences to the picture and you will see that our percentage is close to the American one, but turned upside down.

This should make it clear to the media that there are NOT many universities in Bulgaria and they should stop blowing up this artificially created topic. If the number of universities is reduced, as is often proposed through mergers, this will only reduce competition, which will further reduce quality. The problem in Bulgaria is rooted in the huge state procurement and the subsidy that goes with it, which makes it so that anyone who wants can enroll in excessively and artificially cheap higher education. And artificially cheap and accessible things are both expensive for the taxpayer and not appreciated enough by their users. This leads to the swarming of more and more state universities and, accordingly, makes it difficult for competitive private ones to exist.

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