"Fact" daily writes:
The "Academic City" invented by the authorities can function in the best case after 8 to 10 years, but the process of "demolishing" and closing universities starts from this very day. It turns out that by talking about something that didn't happen, they don't allow universities to carry out internal renovations, create infrastructure, and open laboratories. Education expert Atom Mkhitaryan stated this in a conversation with Past, informing that there is an order that nothing related to infrastructure is financed. "It is obvious to everyone that "Academic City" is "New Vasyuki", it will be like this here, we will fly into space and so on. In fact, this is an idea that arose in the head of someone, and a person without a higher education, who wants to make it look like a law. They have developed a draft law, in which it is written that it will be an "Academic city", it will have so many hectares of territory, and it is not allowed to create any university infrastructure outside of it," says Mkhitaryan. He notes that today we have a decrease in the number of students. 10 years ago, the number of students in the country's universities was from 100 to 105 thousand, and now it is less than 70 thousand. "In the last 10 years, the number of students in Armenia has decreased by 30 percent, in the last 5 years by 15 percent. At the same time, the number of teaching staff has been reduced by more than 12 percent in the last 5 years. In the universities, which accommodated 100 thousand students, now there are not even 70 thousand, and it follows from this that there is 30 percent more space. Despite this, they still want to spend money, according to preliminary calculations, at least 3 billion dollars, and build some kind of infrastructure to move the universities, which are already "impoverished" in terms of people, there," says the education expert.
