Armenian Minister of Education, Science, Culture and Sports Zhanna Andreasyan today, in Yerevan, met with representatives of German and Italian companies who have been awarded contracts to draft a master plan for the Pashinyan’s government’s so-called “Academic City” in Armenia.

Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan, in March 2024, said the country’s higher education sector comprised of sixty colleges and universities is overburdened administratively.

He said his administration’s long-term goal is not to have any university in the capital Yerevan and that all higher education institutions must be in an “Academic City”. While Pashinyan didn’t specify the estimated cost of the planned “Academic City”, he did say it would cost “billions of dollars”.

Attending the meeting were Tobias Keil (Deputy Director of GMP International GmbH Architects and Engineers that designed the master plan of the Academic City); Georgeta Auktor (Senior Project Manager at the Technical University of Munich-International (TUMint) responsible for the formation of a technological cluster and the development of an innovation management model), and Diego Deponte (Director of the Italian company Systematica, responsible for drafting a transportation system for the project).

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” housing eight universities in the country lacks a clear purpose and cannot address Armenia’s challenges through science.

In June 2024, Andreasyan travelled to Germany on a three-day working visit to discuss possible cooperation with German universities to build the “Academic City” in Armenia.