Albanian Education

By Jerina Zaloshnja
At least one hundred children in the Northern Albanian district of Shkodra will not attend school this year. These children live under home confinement because of blood-feuds. Their lives would be threatened if they tried to go to school. Hundreds more Albanian children have dropped out of school for less drastic but still important reasons.
But it is not just pupils and students that are dropping out of school. Almost one third of Albania’s population has left the country in search or jobs and a better life, and there have been many teachers and university professors among them. They too have left their country, choosing to work abroad in professions other than their own. The reasons are purely economic.
Until 1990 there were almost no illiterate people in Albania and the state had managed to guarantee schooling even to the remotest areas of the country. Seventeen years after the fall of the Communist regime the number of pupils not attending school has grown while in a number of areas in the outskirts of cities there is a lack of schools and teachers.
But is everything going so badly for the Albanian education system? That is absolutely not the case. Education is actually one of the areas where one can discern the complex Albanian transition from dictatorship into democracy.
At the start of this academic year local papers in Albania are full of ads for private universities the number of which has grown threefold in recent years. At the same time the number of Albanians studying abroad is also growing year by year. But while the number of private universities has grown as has the number of public universities and their branches, a rather large number of Albanian high school graduates still cannot enter to university. Experts say that there exists a significant gap between the needs for development the country has – the needs of the job market – and what the education system has to offer. Most Albanian high school graduates want to study law or political sciences. This has led many private universities to prepare lawyesr or political scientists. On the other hand Albania inherited few professional schools – and a very limited number of new profesional high schools have been opened – that can prepare elctricians, plumbers, nurses, carpenters, construction workers, cooks, waiters etc, while it is well known how much need there is for such services in the Albanian market. .
The current state of the Albanian education service does not differ much from that of other sectors under development. The problem is that education is tied to the preparation of the future generations and the future of the country. A number of reforms that have been undertaken especially during the last two years aim to bring to an end the trasition in the education system, but education still is not one of the priorities of the Albanian government. Teachers and professors in Albania constitute one of the worst paid categories while the funds and investment in the education system are still insufficient.