Greece’s Education Ministry announced on Friday that four foreign university branches will operate in the country in the academic year 2025-2026.
These universities will operate in Athens and Thessaloniki.
Three out of the four cooperate with local private colleges.
The approved institutions are:
- The University of Nicosia (Cyprus), with independent facilities in Greece;
- The Keele University (UK), in collaboration with Metropolitan College;
- The University of York (UK), in partnership with the City College;
- The Open University, in cooperation with Anatolia College.
The first two will operate in Athens and the other two in Thessaloniki. Among others, they will offer studies in Humanitarian Studies, Law, IT 7 Science, Business Administration and even Medicine.
Prospective students will have to have passed the general university entrance exams after high school.
Following the government’s decision to open its higher education system to the private sector earlier this year, a total of 12 universities had submitted applications to open branches in Greece.
Those universities that were rejected a license can improve their application and submit it again for operation as of the following academic year 2026-2027, state broadcaster ERT reported.
Even if the Greek government praised the foreign university branches in the country as “private non-profit institutions” everybody knows that students will have to pay heavy fees for a degree that would be unable to obtain from a Greek public university.
Some media reported later that the yearly fee will be up to 27,000 euros.
I wonder if the courses are in Greek.
In the UK the Open University is a distance learning organisation. Will it operate as such in Greece?
Open University degrees are totally modular. They offer a wide range of specific courses each of which is worth 1 Credit or, in some cases half a Credit. The courses are deignated as first, second or third level. Students qualify for am ordinary degree when they have acqired 6 Credits and an honours degree when they have acquired 8, with some rules about the number needed at second and third level. Students can take any combination of courses within the overall rules. A student could take a completely arbitrary mixture of Arts, Social Science, Science, Technology and Maths courses. Does Greece have any mechanism for recognising such modular qualifications?
I wondered too. GR has an Open Uni as well.
Question: recognized degrees for which purpose?
It could be a not so clear things as some graduates from private colleges found out their degree is not recognized although they were told otherwise.
The Open University, which was actually a state university created by the Wilson government of the late 60s early 70s, operated in Greece with a large number of students (taught in local classes, unlike in the UK) until 2008. All the professors, including myself, were sacked because the OU could not find a way to operate under Greek law. This despite the rulings of the CJEU against Greece, some 20 years of fines totalling hundreds of millions of euros, and the fact that the Hellenic OU was copied from the UK OU. Specifically, the Greek state bought the courses and syllabuses from the OU — although never used them.
All of our courses were in English, with the administrative office and teaching rooms in Kolonaki.