Losing the student dollar

Private higher education institutions are demanding faster procedures to process student visas to third country nationals, saying Cyprus is losing the chance of becoming a regional education centre, writes Evie Andreou for Cyprus Mail.

DISY party MP Kyriacos Hadjiyiannis recently told the House education committee that the government needed a strategic plan. When university tuition fees, accommodation, food and transportation are taken into account, students spend twenty times more money than tourists, Hadjiyiannis said.

He argued that the rapid increase of foreign students in the north is pushing the government controlled areas out of the regional education map. “In contrast to the Republic, where bureaucracy and the lack of policies have stagnated the arrival of foreign students, we observe that the occupied areas have started to evolve into an education centre,” Hadjiyiannis said.
Full report on the Cyprus Mail site