The Medical College in Ungheni saw off its class of 2026 on 14 July — 125 graduates, in four groups, who spoke the oath and collected their diplomas. All of them enter the labour market with the same qualification: nurse.
It is the college’s largest class in the whole series we can document. The national qualification exam reports, published by the college itself in its transparency section, show a steady climb — 85 graduates in 2023, 119 in 2024, 119 in 2025 — and 125 now. Compared with 2023, the class has grown by almost half. In all those years, every single one of the college’s candidates passed the qualification exam.
The college offers two routes to the same job — „Nursing care”, five years after lower secondary school, and „Medicine”, three years with a baccalaureate. Pharmacy is not taught in Ungheni, even if the title of the national reports might suggest otherwise.
The gap they walk into
The figure of 125 only makes sense next to a second figure.
National Bureau of Statistics data show that in 2014 Ungheni district had 578 people in its mid-level medical staff — nurses, midwives, laboratory technicians. By 2022, the last year for which district data exist, it had 484. That is 94 people fewer, a drop of 16.3% in eight years. The number of doctors fell by 26, from 171 to 145.
Set against population, the district stands at 59 mid-level medical staff per 10,000 inhabitants, while the national average in 2022 was 94.3. The difference has to be read with care — the national average is lifted by the republican hospitals in Chișinău — but the order of magnitude holds: Ungheni has about a third less mid-level staff than the average.
Nationally, the gap is visible in jobs too. In the first quarter of 2026, the health and social work sector had 4,835 vacancies, a rate of 6.6% against 4.6% for the economy as a whole.
In other words, the college in Ungheni produces, year after year, exactly the thing that is missing. The question is whether it stays here.
What a graduate who stays gets — and who the money is actually written for
The state pays young medical specialists a one-off grant. For college graduates — medical staff with post-secondary technical vocational studies — the sum is 96,000 lei, paid in full after six months of work, under a government decision amended in March 2023. The increase to 250,000 lei, decided in October 2024, does not concern them: that goes only to specialists with a university degree.
Here, though, a discrepancy appears that matters directly to a graduate from Ungheni. The government methodology speaks of young specialists placed in employment in rural areas. The Health Ministry’s own statement, by contrast, describes the beneficiaries as those employed in public health institutions „at district level, in villages or communes”.
The two formulations do not say the same thing. Does a graduate who takes a job at Ungheni District Hospital or at the Health Centre in town — that is, in the municipality, not in a village — qualify or not? From the public texts, it cannot be said. For a twenty-year-old, the difference is 96,000 lei.
For comparison, while studying, their college grant was 1,280 to 1,495 lei a month.
Who stays — the figure nobody publishes
How many of the 125 will work in Ungheni district is unknown. Neither the college, nor the hospital, nor the health centre, nor the Ministry of Health has made such a record public.
More than that, the gap itself is invisible. The vacancies page of the Ungheni Health Centre is empty. The District Hospital’s recruitment notice lists 13 specialities and 22 posts — all of them for doctors, none for nurses — and carries no date, which means it cannot be read as a picture of today. On 3 July, the Ministry of Health assigned 88 university graduates to jobs, but said nothing about college graduates.
The closest public position from the local employer comes from the director of Ungheni District Hospital, Elvira Stati, who told Radio Free Europe in May — speaking about doctors:
I think very few would still come to the districts, only those tied to the place they come from. Otherwise, from the experience we have had, it is very hard for us to convince them to stay. Elvira Stati, director of Ungheni District Hospital
The statement is about doctors, not nurses. But it frames the problem the 125 graduates inherit.
Admissions open on 20 July
On 20 July the college opens admissions for the next class — applications run until 7 August, online only. The government has approved, for all the country’s medical colleges, 540 state-funded places and 836 fee-paying ones; how many of them go to Ungheni is not yet public.
The college says it has trained roughly 3,500 medical workers in 25 years. Today’s 125 are the largest annual batch in recent years — and, for now, the only local answer to a gap that has been deepening for a decade.