Our successful story

Authors: Nino Kokashvili, Irakli Barbakadze

The English-taught Master’s program in Quantitative Economics has been opened for 2 years. The rapid development of this program results in increased number of applicants for following years. This program attracts students from all over the world. Based on the applications in this year, students from 29 different countries applied to University of Tartu, for our program. The distribution of applicant by continents is presented in the following graph.

Graph 1.

There are applicants from 4 different continents: Europe, Asia, Africa and America (North and South).  Number of applications for fist year was 57, from which approximately 50% are from Europe, 40% from Asia and 10% - Africa. For the following year the number of applicants has significantly increased, from 57 to 105, but the distribution of applicants between countries remained the same. For current year, the number of applicants has slightly decreased compared to previous year, but the diversity of countries of applicant has increased. The top five countries by the applications are: Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia and Nigeria. The following graph shows the dynamics of number of applicants from these five countries for all three years.

Graph 2.

As we see, our program is most famous in Ukraine and the popularity increases every year. The second most interested country is Azerbaijan and dynamic has an increasing trend. It is not a surprise that Estonians prefer to study Master’s program on their mother tongue.  In the first year the highest share of applications came from Georgia, but in following years the picture has changed, Georgia lost dominant position. Interesting point is that there is an African country, Nigeria, in top five countries by applicants, more interesting is that it has an increasing trend.

All above discussions and statistical analysis are based on the number of applications. The most interesting is the actual numbers of students who were accepted by the program.  The following graph shows the distribution of first generation of students by countries.

Graph 3.

Results are very interesting. While students are from 8 different countries, Georgia and Estonia represent the half of the whole group by 3 students for each country. All other countries: Armenia, Ukraine, Japan, South Korea, Turkey and Russia, have only one representatives. The picture has drastically changed for second year. The following graph shows the distribution of second generation of students by countries.

Graph 4.

Now Ukrainians have the absolute majority, 8 students out of 12 places.  Other students are from Estonia, Georgia and Ethiopia. The current application process is still in progress.

From this statistical analysis it is clear that the program is in a process of development.  The popularity of this master program is increasing in the world, thus, the atmosphere is more competitive and both, applicants and students, are required to follow the trend.