This Tuesday, the Council of Ministers approved the royal decree that regulates the call for study scholarships for the next academic year. The Government will increase the amount allocated to scholarships for the ninth consecutive time since Pedro Sánchez came to Government in 2018. In total, 2,559 million euros will be dedicated to this aid, 83% more than the 1,399 million euros that Mariano Rajoy’s Executive approved in his last year.
To this amount we must add the 18.8 million that will be allocated to the new Luisa de Medrano scholarships, new aid that Sánchez announced yesterday for course stays at universities in another autonomous community, as did the Seneca scholarships that former minister José Ignacio Wert eliminated in 2013 in his spiral of cuts. The Ministry of Education foresees that almost one million students will benefit from the scholarships (752,000 in the general call, 225,000 in the one for students with specific educational support needs), which is 24.5% more than when the PP left the Government.
“It is the largest investment in scholarships in history,” the minister, Milagros Tolón, highlighted at a press conference after the Council of Ministers.
Some stagnant thresholds
In addition to raising the general item, one of the most important new features of this call is that the Executive is going to raise the maximum asset thresholds to request scholarships, which had not been modified for 15 years and had become “outdated,” explained Tolón, who also maintained that “it is not about relaxing requirements, but rather about preventing outdated indicators from excluding families and taking into account their real economic situation.”
The maximum assets threshold is a formula by which, above a certain assets, a family is excluded from scholarships even if they have the right to receive them through income. By updating the maximum values, the Government attacks the revaluation of assets over the years, because the increase in the value of a property in the last decade, for example, could have excluded a family without their situation having changed.
However, the income thresholds, which mark the income line above which you are not entitled to a scholarship, remain the same. Thresholds that many experts consider too low and that leave out families that are below the poverty line.
Education distributes three types of scholarships and family income determines which one can be accessed: the most complete scholarship includes the payment of university tuition, up to 1,700 euros in cash, 2,700 more if the student needs to change residence during the course, between 50 and 125 euros more for excellent performance (more than an 8) and a variable amount that is calculated based on family income and the average grade of the previous year. To access this aid, a family of four cannot earn more than 22,107 euros per year in total, a figure that is below the poverty line.
The second aid is similar to the first, but the fixed amount of 1,700 euros per month is lost. That is, there remains the payment of tuition, the 2,700 euros for changes of residence, the part conditional on excellent performance and the variable depending on income and past performance. To qualify for this scholarship, a family of four cannot earn more than 38,242 euros per year.
The last aid only maintains the payment of tuition and the variable part for excellent performance. A family of four cannot exceed 40,773 euros per year to access this scholarship, the most basic of those offered.
In other words, until this year at least, a family of four in which two adults work and earn the average salary in Spain (27,558 euros gross per year in 2024, according to the INE) cannot access any aid because they exceed all the thresholds.
These figures led to the recent study Is the policy of scholarships and public prices in the Spanish university system really effective?by professors Mónica Martí and Carmen Ródenas, from the University of Alicante, it was concluded that the scholarship system in Spain is ineffective because, as it is designed, it leaves families that are below the poverty line outside of the maximum aid.
The report maintains that the income thresholds are not very well adjusted, especially at the bottom. “Threshold 1 [el que da derecho a la beca completa, con aportación económica incluida] “is always below the limit established to consider a household at risk of poverty,” describes the study, which means that there is a range of income, which is above threshold 1 and below the line that marks the poverty threshold, in which full aid is not received. Too much income to receive the maximum scholarship, in the opinion of the administration, but officially below the line that marks the risk of poverty. This situation may change now with the rise of the thresholds, but it will do so little margin.
New aid for working students
The call for scholarships has two more new features. On the one hand, university and higher artistic education scholarship recipients with partial enrollment taking between 48 and 59 credits, around 20,000 students, will be able to receive, if they meet the other requirements, part of the income scholarship and the residency scholarship (350 euros for each of them).
“It is about facilitating the right to education for students who in turn work, which forces them to resort to partial enrollment,” said the minister, who pointed out that “this measure corrects an exclusion that especially affected those who had fewer resources.”
The second novelty refers to students with disabilities: nearly 2,000 university and higher artistic education students with disabilities between 25% and 64% will see the academic requirements related to the course load required to obtain a scholarship adapted: they will be considered full enrollment for scholarship purposes with 45 credits (instead of the current 60, which are a standard course).
Source: www.eldiario.es
