At a roundtable at the University of Sofia on the demographics of illiteracy and of the lack of proper education Minister of Education Krassimir Valtchev advocated a thesis that absenteeism from school should be deemed a crime. Bulgaria’s worst problem is not the decline of the population but the rise in the numbers of people with poor education, Valtchev said and stressed that 90 percent of the country’s Roma (Gypsies) have education lower than the secondary level. Migration has assumed a cultural profile as the educated flee the uneducated, and the emigration of the educated is a worse problem that the low birth rate, because the country loses not only many young people but also their progeny, the minister said.