The government approved on Wednesday, 1 July, a reform that raises the scholarships of college and university students by at least 40% from 1 September 2026. The biggest increases go to a few fields declared as priorities — medicine, education, agriculture and STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) — that is, exactly the professions most acutely lacking in Ungheni district today. At first glance, it is news cut to the town’s measure. Read closely, it is more complicated.
According to the government’s statement, the study scholarship rises for all specialisms. In medicine, the category I scholarship climbs to 4,565 lei — the largest increase in the package, which the government presents as almost a tripling. Students in education and STEAM specialisms get 50% more than the general level and, on top of that, are no longer capped: all those on state-funded places receive a scholarship. In agriculture, the category I scholarship reaches 2,280 lei. Merit scholarships also rise — the Republic Scholarship, for instance, from 4,450 to 6,230 lei — as does the social scholarship, from 720 to 1,000 lei a month.
The reform comes, however, with a double condition. The scholarship now depends strictly on grades — category I is awarded to those with an average of at least 8.5, and the minimum threshold for any study scholarship has risen to 7.0. And a cap remains: in colleges, at most 70% of full-time students can receive a scholarship; at universities, at most half of the bachelor’s students. The exception — a scholarship for everyone — belongs only to university students in education and STEAM, not to college students.
The first nuance: 4,565 lei is the university scholarship, not the college one
The figure that leaps out — 4,565 lei — is the scholarship of a medical student at a university, in Chișinău. The two colleges in Ungheni are something else: the Medical College, which trains nurses, and the Agro-Industrial College, with technicians for agriculture and the food industry, are post-secondary technical vocational education. Their students fall under a different annex of the decision, with far smaller sums — 1,280 lei at category I for the priority specialisms (medical, agricultural, teaching) and 1,495 in the final years. Anyone studying a non-priority specialism, such as accounting or commodity studies, stays on the general rate of 1,065 lei.
Across the whole district, post-secondary vocational education today has around 1,070 students, according to the National Bureau of Statistics — down from a peak of more than 1,200 a few years ago. Under the new cap, at most seven in ten could receive a scholarship. For them, the increase is real, but the scholarship stays modest — around 1,065 lei at the general level and 1,280 for the priority specialisms, far from the thousands in the headlines about medicine.
The second nuance: the money goes upstream, not to the empty post
The reform’s big stake — and the reason the government ties it to the staff shortage — lies elsewhere. The Ministry of Education says more than 1,500 teaching posts are vacant across the country, hundreds of them in mathematics, physics and chemistry, and that only 17% of students choose teaching or STEAM. Hence the uncapped scholarships for future teachers.
Ungheni district knows the problem from the inside. It enters the new school year with 73 vacant teaching posts — the fifth-largest shortage in the country — and the most uncovered subjects are precisely mathematics, computer science and physics. It is the same in health care: over eight years, the district has been left with 94 fewer nurses and 26 fewer doctors.
Except that the increased scholarships go to university students, not to the students of Ungheni’s colleges, and a scholarship holder is not obliged to return where they are needed. Between the scholarship of a teaching student in Chișinău and a mathematics teacher at a school in Sculeni or Cornești lie several years and no guarantee. The reform therefore acts upstream and over the long term: it may increase the number of young people entering these professions, but it does not place, from 1 September, a nurse at the Ungheni hospital or a teacher at an empty post in the district.
The reform of the scholarship system pursues a very clear goal: to invest more efficiently in performance and in the fields on which the development of the Republic of Moldova depends. Dan Perciun, Minister of Education and Research
The scholarship rises, the salary does not
The decision repeats that scholarships are paid “within the limits of approved budget allocations”, and the total cost of the increase has not been made public. And the scholarship money does not touch the lever the Ministry itself acknowledges as decisive for bringing people to the classroom: the salary. Alongside scholarships, the state is counting on a package of incentives for young specialists — among them a one-off payment of up to 375,000 lei for those who choose a school in a rural area.
The new amounts apply from 1 September 2026. Until then, the district’s young people have a nearer deadline: admission to universities and colleges begins on 27 July, and the admission plans of Ungheni’s two colleges — how many state-funded places, and therefore how many will actually get a scholarship — are published only then.
The figures on scholarship amounts come from the government’s statement of 1 July 2026 and from the Ministry of Education’s decision, with separate annexes for college students and for bachelor’s students. The data on the number of students in the district’s vocational education belong to the National Bureau of Statistics (Ungheni district), and those on vacant teaching posts to the Ministry of Education — the list finalised on 5 June 2026, counted by Triunghi.md for Ungheni district. The exact sums the students of the two colleges will receive and the number of beneficiaries depend on the admission plans and budget allocations, which were not public at the time of publication.