The Jornal de Notícias (JN) reports today that university students owe 36 million euros in tuition fees to major public universities and polytechnics, a figure accumulated over the past three academic years across 14 national public institutions.
In statements to JN, presidents of student federations attribute the debt to delays in scholarship payments.
“The information I have is that scholarships are being paid. In fact, they are currently paid weekly for new scholarships. Last year, we had a record number of scholarships, 84,000. The payments are not perfect, they can be improved, but they are being made faster than ever before. This hasn’t changed, in fact, it has improved, and so I don’t think there’s any relation to that,” emphasized Fernando Alexandre.
The official, speaking to journalists at the signing of the Regional Thematic Network ‘Enhancement of Higher Education and Knowledge in the North’ protocol, held at the Paço dos Duques in Guimarães, Braga district, said he was unaware of all the data from the JN report but expressed concern about a specific figure.
“I don’t know the original data. From the data I saw, it’s about 36 million euros [in debt], but 15 million euros are from an institution that is ISCTE [University Institute of Lisbon] and so I was concerned about ISCTE. I think it’s necessary to see what’s happening with that institution. I will contact the rector to try to understand what’s going on,” stated Fernando Alexandre.
According to the minister, “there is a process of scholarship payments that has been improving” over the years.
“It’s not perfect; it’s one dimension we want to change with a new information system that makes the process faster. But that’s not what changed. For there to be a relationship between the two dimensions, there would have had to be a change in social action processing, and there wasn’t. If there was, they were improvements, not the opposite,” highlighted the official.
In the minister’s view, the situation is due not to a system issue but to “some educational institutions.”
“There’s historically a problem with recovering overdue tuition fees. It’s not a new phenomenon. I would like to better understand these numbers. What is the delay? When we have 11% of students dropping out of higher education after the first year, there needs to be communication that these students must cancel their enrollment to avoid having the amount in debt, and I don’t know if the institutions are doing this adequately,” noted Fernando Alexandre.
