Public Funds for Student Support during Economic Crisis

Knowledge societies emphasise the importance of education as one of the key factors for economic and social progress. Recently, as the negative impact on public funding of tertiary education spread with the global economic crisis, these expectations increased even further, particularly in countries that were economically more affected by the crisis. We examined how the global economic crisis affected the funding for student support in European countries, depending on the specific situation of individual economies. We divided the countries into two groups based on the impact of the global economic crisis on their economies: economically more affected and economically less affected countries. Using these two groups, we comparatively studied the changes in the financing of student support between 2008 and 2011, i.e. since the beginning of the global economic crisis and until the last year for which the data was available. We compared the changes in funding between the two groups. On average, public spending on student support as a share of total public spending on tertiary education is higher in economically more affected countries and lower in the group of economically less affected countries. The change in this proportion was positive in both groups of countries, but the increase was higher in the economically more affected countries than in the economically less affected countries. We note, therefore, that the group of economically more affected countries faces a reduction in the total public spending, but tries regardless, to largely protect the less privileged groups of students by increasing or maintaining the public spending on student support, thereby enabling access to tertiary education for the widest possible population.