Several dozen students took to the streets on Saturday in Bucharest and in the big university cities to express their dissatisfaction with the underfunding of Education.
During the evening of Saturday, March 14, students from several university centers organized protests to draw attention to the reduction of scholarships and the diminishing of the rights granted to them, including those related to transport. Young people claim that the new provisions adopted by the Government will affect interest in studies and risk increasing school dropouts.
The actions, generically named “Manifesto for Education”, were initiated by student organizations that are members of the National Alliance of Student Organizations in Romania (ANOSR).
The protests started at 19:00 in Victoriei Square in Bucharest and took place simultaneously in cities such as Timișoara, Cluj-Napoca and Alba Iulia.
The organizers explained that the demonstrations are intended to draw attention to the insufficient level of education funding, given that the draft State Budget Law for 2026 provides for the allocation of only approximately 3.03% of GDP for this field.
The participants came with placards on which they displayed messages such as: “Small budget for education, big speeches”, “The economy, saved from student scholarships”, “The scholarship is not a bonus, it is a necessity”, “Write laws for education or against it?”, “We are the future, but without a scholarship we are just a bitter dream” and “Students don’t live with applause.”
In Alba Iulia, a young woman carried a placard with the message: “You know the bank with the statue? Statue takes everything,” while in Timișoara the protesters displayed the message: “Performance without funding? Good joke!”.
A student from the University of Alba Iulia explained the reasons for the actions: “We are demonstrating against the provisions of law 141 from the previous year, by which quite a few rights were taken away from us, from scholarships to free transportation. We believe that we must have a say. If it continues in this way, school dropouts will increase, and young people will be less and less interested in studying, because if they do not have support, they will not see the point of studying.”
