The controversy surrounding the First Lady’s fund has reopened, in earnest, the debate on student grants and how well they reflect the real and contemporary needs of students. The reality is clear. Student welfare policy in Cyprus is stuck in another era, built around plugging gaps rather than addressing root problems, both in its philosophy and in the way public money is spent. This vacuum is precisely what creates “opportunities” for private companies or so-called philanthropists to step in and cover needs through opaque and questionable processes.
Even when a student today receives the maximum support available through the State Scholarship Foundation and the student grant scheme, they are still forced to dig deep into their own pockets to make studying possible. There is also a striking contradiction. The excellence scholarship awarded by the State Scholarship Foundation is significantly higher than the core student welfare grant, which is supposedly designed to support students based on income criteria. This is where a serious discussion must begin, one focused on rationalising and reassessing how the state spends tens of millions of euros on students each year.
If the state truly wants to address students’ problems, it must urgently invest far more in student residences that can cover the vast majority of students. At the same time, universities should be required to meet clear conditions, linking any increase in student numbers to the availability of adequate housing. This is how the most pressing issue students face today, housing, can be addressed in a meaningful way. It also raises an obvious question. Why has the state, for all these years, failed to build its own student residences in Greek cities with large Cypriot student populations?
Many may not realise that even today, students at Cyprus’s public universities are required to buy their own textbooks. Everyone looks the other way while student organisations, acting as informal intermediaries, photocopy and distribute books at lower cost. How much would it really cost to ensure free access to textbooks, even through university library lending systems? When €200 to €300 a year is spent on books alone, how far can a grant realistically go? A similar picture emerges with student meals. There is no comprehensive student canteen system that provides free meals to specific groups and low-cost meals to others, every day and for all meals. In Limassol, this role is filled, thankfully, by the Metropolis rather than the state.
And then there is transport. In Cyprus, very few students can realistically study without owning a car, due to the lack of adequate public transport. Students are forced to spend thousands of euros to purchase a vehicle as a prerequisite for starting their studies. Would it not be worth investing in free public transport for students? Beyond easing financial pressure, this would also help cultivate a culture of public transport use among the younger generation.
If we want to be truly honest, Cypriot universities must also complete their academic development. They need to establish new departments and schools so they can function as fully comprehensive universities. To this day, public universities in Cyprus lack programmes in Music, Physical Education, Dentistry, Pharmacy, Veterinary Medicine, and many other fields. As a result, students who wish to pursue these disciplines are pushed abroad, where they are forced to pay many times more.
So yes, increasing funding matters, as does distributing it where real needs exist. But what matters even more is serious investment in educational infrastructure. That is where genuine concern for the next generation is demonstrated. Grants, especially when handed out by philanthropists, create dependency. They bind those who struggle to those who have, without ever addressing the structural conditions that make studying unaffordable in the first place.