Bulgaria is home to the fastest-shrinking population in the world. In 2018, Bulgaria’s population stood at just seven million and is shrinking at an average of 0.7 per cent each year. There is high outward migration, in particular among people aged 20-39. This is in part driven by the large number of Bulgarians leaving the country to study and to search for higher wages and better working conditions abroad.
Over 25,000 Bulgarian students studied abroad in 2017, accounting for 17 per cent of the total student population, an increase of over 10,000 from 2000. The UK is the largest study destination, hosting more than 6,000 Bulgarian students in 2018/19, 88 per cent of whom were enrolled in an undergraduate programme. Bulgaria is currently the 10th largest EU sender of students to the UK, as the country has a relatively small pool of students to send. While a large number of Bulgarians go abroad for tertiary study, an increasing number of internationally mobile students from Greece, Turkey, the UK and Germany are enrolling at Bulgarian institutions. In 2018, there were 16,345 foreign students studying at HEIs in Bulgaria, an 8.7 per cent increase from the previous year.
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| MIB-Bulgaria_2019-20.pdf |