Friday, March 29

Students will know if they are entitled to a scholarship before the course begins

More scholarships and earlier. The Council of Ministers approved this Tuesday the Royal Decree on scholarships for the 2022-2023 academic year, which will be endowed with 2,134 million euros and is expected to benefit almost one million students. The main novelty this year is that the Government has advanced the call four months, so that it will be resolved (according to the calculations of the Ministry of Education) approximately in July. The Executive thus attends to one of the main claims of the students, who asked to know if they are entitled to an aid before starting the enrollment.

Both the item planned for scholarships (2,134 million euros) and the number of beneficiaries will be at record highs, calculate Education and Universities. Since the 2017-2018 academic year, the number of beneficiaries has increased by 14.3% and the budget by 45%.

The scholarship item includes two main types of differentiated aid: non-university and university stages. In the first case, this announcement from the ministry only covers Baccalaureate and Vocational Training in general. There is a section that includes all the stages (from Infant to Baccalaureate) for students with a specific need for educational support, which includes five groups: students with disabilities, high abilities, severe behavioral disorder, autism spectrum disorder and severe disorder of the comunication.

University scholarships only go up to master’s degrees – the doctorate is left out because there are FPI and FPU contracts – and they are limited to official degrees, not their own. In this category, the family income determines the right or not to the scholarship and how much it covers, if only the cost of enrollment or includes additional financial aid. All the information can be consulted on the ministry’s scholarship portal.

Regarding university students, which account for approximately two out of every three scholarships and eat up most of the budget, the number of recipients has been growing in recent years in part because the Government has lowered the requirements to request and maintain a scholarship and expanded the group who is entitled to full aid (registration payment and extra financial supplement), after former minister José Ignacio Wert toughened them up.

The main changes that the Executive has introduced have gone through lowering the necessary grade in the academic requirements to qualify for a grant to a pass (a 5), ​​a circumstance that this year extends to qualifying master’s degrees. The maximum income thresholds that families can enter to qualify for the different scholarships have also been raised. For example, threshold 1 rises to equal the poverty threshold (in the previous call it was set at 8,422 euros for a family of one member and a maximum of 21,054 euros per year for a family of four members), which will favor more students can opt for full aid, which includes the payment of tuition and additional financial compensation.



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