In our graduation thesis, we wanted to highlight the problems encountered by foreign students who come from the countries of the former Yugoslavia to study at the University of Ljubljana. These problems were related to the process of obtaining a residence permit, and we wanted to better understand how the process of proving sufficient funds took place during the academic year 2021/2022 if there were other problems with obtaining the permit. We were interested in whether there is a connection between the monthly income of students and the need to prove €5,000 in their account, and how they proved this amount or how they plan to prove it. Some of the findings will touch on the reasons of students coming to Slovenia, how long they have been living in Slovenia and where they live. Smajila (2021) writes that, according to the new rules, students must show sufficient the funds in advance for the duration of their studies, which means that they must have approximately €5,000 in their account for a one-year stay. Foreign students from Serbia, Bosnia, and Macedonia, who have been studying in Slovenia for a long time, warn that the law is forcing them into a corner: if they cannot afford to continue their studies, their years of education will be wasted. Our research is empirical, qualitative and quantitative, the measuring instruments of empirical data are a partially standardized interview and an online survey questionnaire. The survey questionnaire was provided in two languages, Serbian and Slovenian and during the interviews, the interviewees are first asked in which language they feel most relaxed and in which language they find it easier to speak. The population is that of foreign students who come from the former Yugoslav republics and who, in the academic year 2021/2022, have a student status at UL, the sample is non-random and convenient, 131 people participated in the research, 125 people participated in surveys and 6 people in interviews. We came to the results that the monthly income and the need to prove €5,000 in the student's account are strongly related, that students had a quite negative experience when obtaining a residence permit, that the majority, or rather 43.69% of students, came to obtain higher education in Slovenia because it is free, but more than half (53%) of male and female students had to show the existence of €5,000 in their account as a way of proving sufficient funds. Recommendations for further research are to focus on the variety of problems faced by foreign students and not just on the limitations that we have set, and to expand the population to students studying at other universities in Slovenia.
|
