STA, 1 October 2021 - Slovenia has become an attractive studying environment for foreign students, judging by the growth in their numbers, a trend recorded at all Slovenian universities. While foreign students represented 4.5% of all students in the 2017/2018 academic year, they accounted for 11% of a total of some 65,000 students in the 2020/2021.
Most students from abroad study at the University of Ljubljana, which is the oldest and largest Slovenian university, with some 40,600 students.
The number of foreign students at the university rose from 2,476 in 2017/18 to 3,653 in 2020/21, which makes foreigners account for 9% of all its students.
At the University of Maribor, the country's second oldest and second largest, the figure was up almost 24% in the 2020/21 academic year 1,463 from 2019/20.
This was 10.5% all the 13,950 university students that studied in Maribor the last academic year.
However, it was the University of Primorska which enrolled the most foreign students in relation to the total number of its students in the last academic year.
The share stood at 12% in the 2017/18 academic year, but rose to 15.5% in 2020/21.
Education Ministry data shows that in 2020/21, 7,681 students from outside Slovenia studied in Slovenia: 2,154 from the EU and 5,527 from third countries.
Foreign students studying here that year came from 121 countries, the majority from Europe, up from 93 in 2016.
Most students from other European countries are from the countries which emerged in the area of the former Yugoslavia - Serbia, North Macedonia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro.
