
Armenian Government Plan to Build $3 Billion "Academic City" Lacks Financing Details
How Armenia plans to pay for the construction of the so-called “Academic City”, estimated to cost US$3 billion, remains unclear.
Armenian Minister of Education and Science Zhanna Andreasyan, in October 2023, announced that the plan is to house eight state and eight private/international universities on the site with dormitories, a sports arena and cinema.
The government says a 2030 deadline to complete the project is realistic.
Armen Simonyan, Director of the Academic City Foundation, says the Armenian government has signed an 850,000 Euro contract with the German company International GmbH Architects and Engineers to draft a conceptual plan for the project, and a 200-million-dram contract with the National University of Architecture and Construction of Armenia.
Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan has said his administration’s long-term goal is not to have any university in the capital Yerevan, arguing the country’s higher education sector of sixty colleges and universities is overburdened administratively.
“Sixty universities mean sixty rectors, 120 vice-rectors, several hundred deans, and some 1,000 deputy deans, etc.,” he said last March.
Chairman of Armenia’s Committee for Higher Education and Science (CHES), Sargis Hayotsyan tells Hetq that the state must take the lead in financing such a project to ultimately attract private investment.
Hayotsyan didn’t rule out government borrowing from international partners to finance the project.
Pashinyan has said the government is discussing whether to lease buildings now housing universities in Yerevan to an international management company and to use the proceeds to finance the “Academic City”.
A coalition of tech and science sector entrepreneurs and researchers in Armenia, going under the name Gituzh (Power of Science) says the Armenian government’s plan to build an “Academic City” lacks a clear purpose and cannot address Armenia’s challenges through science.
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