Belgrade professor warns of low education level in Serbia

NEWS 28.01.202119:33
N1 (arhiva)

A Belgrade University professor warned on Thursday that a large part of the population of Serbia have very little education, a large part of them having just eight years of mandatory elementary school.

“We have a very high number of people with little education and an even smaller number of people with higher levels of education… Those people are in danger and without help from the state they can’t find a place in society,” Professor Aleksandar Baucal said, adding that it’s clear that in current conditions people with elementary school educations will face serious difficulties in finding a job.

He warned that 20 years of reforms have brought no great improvement in the education system. “There is no progress in the education system because every education minister starts his term in office from scratch and that is why we have had more than two million people without basic qualifications for decades,” Baucal said.

The Beta news agency said that Republic Statistics Office (RZS) figures for 2011 (when the most recent census was held) showed that 164,884 people were registered as having no education and 677,499 had incomplete education whiule 127,463 were illiterate and 1,279,116 had only elementary school education. About three million graduated high school and about a million had university level educations.