The Establishment and Evolution of the National Scholarship Programme of the Slovak Republic (2006-2025): A Historical and Institutional Aspect

Abstract

This article presents a historical-institutional analysis of the origins, legal framework, and developmental stages of the National Scholarship Programme of the Slovak Republic (NSP) during 2006-2025. The study examines the experience of Central and Eastern European countries in integrating into the European research and higher education area, where academic mobility has become an important instrument of international cooperation, science diplomacy, and soft power. The research is based on the principles of historicism, objectivity, and systematic analysis, employing historical-institutional, historical-genetic, and historical-comparative methods, content analysis, and statistical examination of materials produced by the Slovak Academic Information Agency (SAIA), government documents, and diplomatic sources.

The article proposes a historical periodization of the NSP’s evolution comprising three major stages. It demonstrates that the programme’s inclusion among the Slovak Republic’s programmes of national interest strengthened its administrative and legal framework. The analysis of outgoing mobility identifies 2,437 Slovak scholarship holders, whose preferred destinations were Central Europe and the Anglo-American academic sphere. The study also reveals a more than twelvefold increase in international demand for the programme, accompanied by intensified competition: by 2025, the applicants’ success rate had declined to 19%, while the cumulative number of international scholarship recipients reached 3,911.

Particular attention is paid to the Ukrainian dimension of the NSP. Based on the author’s calculations, Ukrainian participation comprised 2,487 applicants (22.2% of all international applicants) and 904 awarded scholarships (23.1% of all successful candidates), with university teachers and researchers accounting for 74.6% of participants. The article traces the dynamics of Ukrainian participation from its peak in 2015-2017, when Ukrainians represented more than 40% of the international competition, and the relocation-driven maximum in 2022 (78 scholarship recipients), to a sharp decline in 2024-2025, when the success rate fell to 19.7%. It concludes that increasing global competition, particularly from applicants representing Asia and South America, has gradually transformed the NSP into a programme primarily supporting established Ukrainian researchers who already possess legal grounds for residing abroad.