Minister of Culture and Innovation Balázs Hankó of Hungary has announced that scholarship payments to Hungarian university students will increase by at least 50 per cent in the upcoming spring semester. He made these statements at a press conference in Budapest, Hungary, on Thursday, 26 February.

What made this possible is that university funding has increased by more than two and a half times on average in recent years, he explained. In other words, universities are using both their existing resources and additional performance-based funding to raise scholarships according to their own criteria, the Minister added.

He went on to share that this semester, the minimum increase in scholarship payments to students is around 5.5 billion HUF ($17.3 million), while universities have proposed increases totalling 8.2 billion HUF ($25.8 million). He also added that some institutions are raising scholarships by more than 100 per cent.

So, in Hungarian higher education, this represents an 84 per cent increase in academic scholarships, but it reaches a minimum increase of 50 per cent at each university, Minister Hankó concluded.

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