Varujan Vosganian was born in Craiova to a family of Armenian ethnicity. His grandparents were survivors of the genocide against Armenian people which took place in the Ottoman Empire in 1915. Vosganian studied at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza High School in Focșani. He then studied Commerce at the Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies (graduated 1982) and Mathematics at the University of Bucharest (graduated 1991), gaining a Ph.D. in economics in 1998.