The center-right Greek government this month made good on its pre-election pledge, prior to the snap July 2019 election, to eliminate numerous tertiary-level departments scattered around the country that were expected to meet with feeble or no interest among prospective college students.
Most of the axed departments are subsidiaries in provincial cities of a nearby university, and were established – on paper – by the previous leftist SYRIZA government or upgraded to university level from the tertiary technical school (TEI) level.
None of the 37 new departments, created despite intense criticism from the academic community and researchers by then SYRIZA minister Costas Gavroglu, included tech-related or IT-related fields, despite Greece ostensibly posting a shortage in programmers, software engineers and technology specialists. Additionally, except for two new departments for speech therapy and one for physical therapy, none of the other 34 were health-related.
At the same time, the departments include studies and disciplines widely available in other Greek universities, such as geology, foodstuff technology, various agriculture/aquaculture related occupations, and even a “tourism studies & alternative tourism” department in a town on the island of Evia (Psahna), and an “ethnic-music” department in the second largest town on the island of Cephalonia, Lixouri.
The more-or-less expected announcement came on the heels of the University of Patras, in western Greece, eliminating four of its own academic departments due to low demand and low admissions scores for entry into those programs, as well as the imposition of a roughly 50-percent minimum score for admission in the annual nationwide exam.
