Each eighth student in lecture halls in Moldova is a foreigner. Most of the students who come to study in Moldova are from Romania. A record was hit in 2020, when 2,125 Romanians came to study in Moldova. The next countries from which students come to Moldova are, in descending order, Israel, India, Ukraine, Syria, and Jordan. Veaceslav Ioniță, expert of the Institute for Development and Social Initiatives “Viitorul”, said the higher education sector in Moldova goes through a crisis caused by the negative demographic tendencies. If the foreigners had been absent, the sector would have been more seriously hit, IPN reports.

In the program “Economic Analyses with Veaceslav Ioniță”, the expert said the export of education services was unjustly ignored by the authorities. This annually generates US$100,000 revenues. The Government should increase the number of foreign students, especially of those from countries where record highs were witnessed earlier. Currently, there is an enormous struggle for the international education market. The countries make huge effort to gain money from education. “The foreign students enable our students to be included in the international circuit and enable us to secure financial resources for our universities so that these can improve the quality of education, performance,” stated the expert.

Veaceslav Ioniță said that about 1,200 foreign students studied in Moldova 12 years ago. Currently, there are about 4,600 students. This is a rather large figure as the number of students in Moldova decreases drastically each year owing to demographic factors, migration and studying abroad. The number of students in Moldova declined from 128,000 in 2007-2008 to 57,000 in 2019-2020.

 “As the number of Moldovan students decreases, the group of foreign students grows and this enables us to keep the education system afloat and to even save it,” opined the expert.

“The Republic of Moldova, besides the exported goods totaling US$2.7 billion, also exports services that come to US$1.3 billion. The service sector is an area where we export more than we import. Among the main exported services are the transport, IT and education services.”