The lucky new holder of the highest university decree will be Katarina Polajnar Horvat of the Faculty of Arts.

The Ljubljana university has been developing its post-graduate studies since their founding in 1919. The first doctorate was conferred in 1920 on Anka Mayer for chemistry.

The post-graduate studies have seen many transformations since, most recently at the introduction of the Bologna system.

While at first faculties were not united on which standards to follow in conferring doctorates (some followed the rules of the Belgrade and others of Austrian universities), unity was introduced with the new Yugoslavian university law in 1930.

In the next decades, the number of areas in which a doctorate could be obtained multiplied.

Since the mid-1950s the number of titles conferred was rising. It reached 1,168 at the end of 1969, fifty years since the founding of the university.

Good four decades later, at the end of 2010, the university conferred its 8,000th doctorate, while it finished 2012 with 8766 titles conferred.

The overhaul of the Ljubljana-based doctoral studies, which started in 2005, led to the founding of the Doctoral School in 2007.

But while the university's strategy for 2012-2020 period envisages boosting of the doctoral studies, the students and scientists are complaining about problems with financing. As a result, the number of students is dropping each year.

In the 2010-2012 period, students could apply for EU subsidies, but under the new financial perspective the criteria will be much stricter and only those boasting scientific articles or a patent will be eligible for EU support.

In the 2015/2016 academic year, only 765 new students were admitted to the programme, while last year their number was 808.