Posted on behalf of Michele Catanzaro
Only students already resident in Spain will be allowed to apply to one of the country’s two main PhD fellowship programmes this year. And no more than 50 of the roughly 950 fellowships will go to non-European students.
The FPU programme, run by the Ministry of Education, finances about one third of the PhD students who receive funding from Spain’s national government, according to data from the ministry. Another third are supported by the FPI programme, run by the Ministry of Science and Innovation, and the rest comes from other institutions. In the last call, 102 fellowships were issued to non-Spanish students (42 of them to non-Europeans), out of a total of 949.
Spain’s scientific community is upset about the barriers to foreign students, and the lack of warning. The call for applications including the restrictions was launched at the end of January, and the deadline for applications was 14 February.
“I had all the documents of a French candidate ready, when somebody alerted me that the new regulation would forbid his application: it took me completely by surprise,” says Pere Colet, a physicist at the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems (IFISC), in Palma de Mallorca. Now, he is afraid that the student he wants to take on will go somewhere else.
This year, candidates are required to have proof of residence in Spain – either a foreigner identification number (NIE), or be registered as an EU national living in Spain. And they need to have received these documents before the publication of the call last month, while in previous years they could be obtained during the application process.
According to the European PhD students’ association Eurodoc, most EU countries do not impose substantial barriers to non-residents. The UK is one of the few exceptions: there, public money is reserved only for UK nationals and to people living in the country for at least three years. In its most recent PhD fellowship call, Portugal introduced a 5-year residence condition, which encountered a strong opposition from researchers – in the end, the government agreed to relax the restrictions for the 2010 call.
A spokesperson from the Ministry of Science and Innovation said the FPI call, due in the next few weeks, will not include the same restrictions on foreign students. However, Jesús Moreno, director general of university policy at the Ministry of Education, defends their choice. “Reaching a share of 50 non-Europeans per year would be an improvement with respect to current numbers, and this is what we aim at in this call,” he says. “Moreover, this grant scheme is not designed to attract talented foreigners, but rather to fund the best ones who have already chosen Spanish PhD programmes.”
The number of students affected may be small, but Colet worries about the effect on Spanish science. “These limitations may be legal, but the real questions is: are they good for science? I think the only effect they have is promoting mediocrity,” he says.