Agricultural School of Etoloakarnania: To survive by “fishing” from the “reservoir” of 4.7% of students

Attracting students is a challenge, when only 4.7% of students in Greece choose agricultural sciences, fish farming and veterinary medicine

The National Authority for Higher Education (ETHAAE) records the many problems of Higher Education in Greece in its latest report.

From all the conclusions of the ETHAAE, the fact stands out that only one in five students in Greek HEIs completes his studies within the minimum study time of his school. While most students take almost six years to complete a four-year degree program, which is the minimum duration of an undergraduate program. At the same time, Greece remains the country with the highest student-to-teacher ratio, 33 credits away from the European average. .

In particular, in relation to the University of Patras, the number of active undergraduate students per faculty member is 43, when the national average is 36. The positives for the University of Patras are that it is among the first Universities in the country to receive significant funding from the “Horizon 2020” program , as it ranks third in the country with €62.95 million. The University of Patras also performs quite well in terms of the most total appearances in the nine international ranking systems, as it is ranked fourth in the country with 8 appearances.

What emerges from the ETHAAE’s annual report and concerns more the Faculty of Agriculture of the University of Patras, which is only a few years old, since it actually started operating in 2019, is the low demand that agricultural sciences have in general. This was seen in the previous years especially with the establishment of the minimum admission base and the fact that not only in the agricultural department, but in general in many university departments of the provincial universities a large percentage of admission places remained vacant. Also, according to ETHAAE data, despite the fact that there are many agricultural departments in Greece, agricultural sciences, together with fish farming and veterinary medicine (as a subject area), is chosen by only 4.69% of the country’s students. Parenthetically, let it be mentioned that in Greece most students choose engineering, construction and building sciences (20.98%), as a result of the universityization of the former TEIs in which a large number of such Departments operated, while in second place, come the business administration and legal studies (19.47%).
It is worth noting that for the agricultural sciences at a pan-European level, the percentage of students who choose them is considerably smaller (below 2%) even than that of Greece and naturally comes as a consequence of the great shrinking of the primary sector in Greece and in Europe the recent years.

In other words, it is easy to see that the future of these sciences, if something does not change, is not auspicious in terms of attracting new students. In particular, the relatively new Faculty of Agriculture of the University of Patras, which is ranked sixth in the URAP index among nine corresponding schools in Greece, certainly has a very big challenge ahead of it. It is recalled that last year the newly founded Department of Sustainable Agriculture in Agrinio, in the first year in computer science, did not manage to have a single successful student from the General High Schools. Accordingly, the two Departments of the School based in Messolonghi in recent years have not zero, but a very small number of students, as there were years when the successful candidates barely exceeded 20. And already in circles of the Ministry of Education there are “whispers” of mergers and locks in Departments with a very small number of students. So the challenge of attracting new students seems almost urgent.

The establishment of the Agricultural School in Etoloakarnania may have seemed to everyone as something desirable and something that matched the productive profile of the region, however in practice so far things are not as auspicious as they seemed at first sight, as they pre-exist and precede in ranking, several similar Departments in the country.

Follow agrinioculture.gr on GoogleNews and be the first to see all the news
Read all the latest news from Agrinio and Etoloakarnania at AgrinioCulture.gr