President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Oct. 6 praised his government’s expansion of higher education across Türkiye, saying it had improved equal access to education for students regardless of their income or where they live.
“We brought quality higher education to every corner of Anatolia. We mobilized the resources of our state so that the children of this country, regardless of which income group they come from, could receive an education in the cities where they live,” Erdoğan said at an event in Ankara.
He said the government had abolished university tuition fees, increased scholarships for undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students and upgraded the infrastructure and digital facilities of universities and student dormitories.
“We did not want the child of the poor to be deprived of higher education while the child of the rich studies,” he said. “We did not want them to have to postpone their dreams or start life five goals behind.”
Erdoğan also defended his government’s policy of opening universities across all 81 provinces and increasing the number of international students in Türkiye, rejecting criticism that universities had been expanded too widely.
“Opposing the expansion of universities means opposing equal opportunity in education,” Erdoğan said.
He argued that education remained a key driver of social mobility in Türkiye and said opposing wider access to higher education effectively told the children of workers and farmers to remain in the same social position.
Erdoğan also defended the internationalization of Turkish universities, saying countries including the United States and Britain generate significant revenue from international students and use education as an instrument of cultural, commercial and scientific policy.
“If anyone is disturbed by Turkish universities opening up to the world, they do not want our country’s soft power to increase,” he said.
Erdoğan also highlighted the rising share of women among academics, saying women now account for around 47 percent of academic staff at Turkish universities.
He said a law passed by parliament on July 30 had reopened access to universities for young people whose education had been interrupted for various reasons.
Erdoğan said the number of universities in Türkiye had risen from 76 when his government first came to power to 208, while the number of student dormitories increased from 190 to 877. Dormitory bed capacity rose from 182,000 to 1 million, he said.
He also pointed to Türkiye’s performance in international university rankings, saying six Turkish universities entered the global top 500 in 2026, including two in the top 300. “These figures are important, but in our view they are not enough,” the president added.
