FLASH
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Fewer students, fewer schools, less life, the crisis that is alarming Greece...
Greece's depopulation is increasingly affecting the field of education. And the long-term impact of the falling birth rate during the dark years of austerity measures imposed on the Mediterranean country by the Troika (European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund) and the economic crisis in Athens is being felt with full force.
School austerity measures in Greece
The government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis has decided that 721 of the country’s 13,748 primary schools will not reopen for the next school year, a significant 5% drop from one school year to the next, according to the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs, which oversees education in Greece. Sofia Zacharaki, head of the ministry and Mitsotakis’ partner in the conservative New Democracy party, is coordinating the implementation of a plan of cuts dictated by the sharp drop in enrollment, which will force some Greek students to travel 80 kilometers to attend primary school.
This year, Greece’s student population will be 1.2 million, 150,000 fewer than in the 2018-2019 school year, an 11% drop in six years, concentrated not only in the islands and depopulated rural areas, but also in Attica and the capital Athens. The number of so-called “suspended schools” facing closure is also on the rise. As Ekathimerini explained, “a school is suspended if it does not reach a minimum number of 15 students” and can remain in this status for a maximum of three years before being permanently closed.
Economic crisis, demographic crisis, educational crisis
A real blow to the school population is now coming as a result of the severe blow to the birth rate between 2008 and 2015, when Athens first suffered the Great Recession and the sovereign debt crisis, and then the imposition of an austerity agenda that led, over the following decade, to a severe reduction in the state and living standards. Only with the contribution of a few sectors such as tourism and the reduction of labor costs, the country struggled to recover, however, entering the ranks of the most structurally fragile economies in Europe.
The fertility rate in Greece has been structurally declining for decades and has not been above the natural replacement rate since 1983, when it fell from 2.03 the previous year to 1.94 children per woman. However, in 2008-2009, after a period of growth in the previous decade, it still stood at 1.5 children per woman. The long-term effects of the crisis reduced it to 1.29 children per woman in just a few years, leading to a trend of recoveries and declines that took it to 1.26 children per woman in 2024, never recovering from its post-crisis decline.
Fewer and fewer Greeks, increasingly poorer
Furthermore, the Greek Reporter notes, among other factors, "the country's severe economic crisis, which began in 2008, has led to a large-scale exodus of young and educated Greeks seeking better opportunities abroad. This brain drain has further reduced the number of people in their prime childbearing and working years."
From 11.2 million in 2010, Greece’s population has fallen to its current 9.9 million, a 15-year decline of 11.6%. GDP is two-thirds of its pre-crisis peak, and GDP per capita is 22% below 2008 levels. Greeks are increasingly fewer, destined to fall further in number, and poorer, both in relative and absolute terms, than in the pre-crisis era, before austerity. The decline of the education sector follows the collapse of public services, such as healthcare, and the privatization of many critical assets that saw Athens through its darkest hour of financial stress. The demographic crisis is the latest poisonous fruit of austerity. It is a mortgage on the future of a Greece that today is unable to figure out how to get out of this crisis that has become existential. / Adapted from “Inside Over”
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