The government needs to shut down or increase supervision on private universities before they destroy the entire education system and the futures of young people.
Tirana Times Editorial
TIRANA, May 10 – The scandal involving the son of an Italian politician who never stepped foot in Albania yet obtained a degree from a private university here has revived the debate about the quality of Albanian diplomas and the way they are obtained by fraud and under little supervision by Albanian education officials who are supposed to guard the education system.
The Renzo Bossi case is an example of a private Albanian education system that is at best corrupt and at worst a pyramid scheme playing games with the future of the students who actually attend classes.
The Albanian press is now dealing with this issue quite a bit, but in fact, it was this newspaper, Tirana Times, that months ago published a front-page article investigating private universities in Albania.
We questioned how serious these private institutions were, raising worries that they might be simply for-profit diploma mills, a form of a pyramid scheme in the education.
But it took the Renzo Bossi scandal to bring this issue to the forefront of media attention.
Everyone knows what is happening in the education system with private universities that have popped up everywhere like mushrooms after the rain, but few are willing to speak against it or do something to correct it.
The reaction of the Minister of Education is pitiful. In fact, there has pretty much been no response at all on this issue. Had this been a country where rules and regulations were sacred, the minister would have resigned by now.
The only good thing about the Bossi story is that it is finally prompting the local press to investigate private universities further. For example, one media outlet revealed that while performing quality checks in one private university, the Ministry of Education officials determined that 250 students were enrolled without high school diplomas, making it possible from someone with no or little formal education to obtain a master’s degree.
The biggest problem is that even after the shocking facts are made public, there appears to be little action by relevant authorities – and there appears to be no incentive to change things at all on the universities’ side too.
Just a week after the Bossi story broke, a university named after shopping windows distributed a poster offering a Nokia cell phone to all students who register by Friday. If they waited until Sunday, the gift would be a surprise.
When a foreign diplomat was informed of the poster, he jokingly suggested that the surprise gift could be getting a diploma right away – no need to go to school at all.
At the end of the day, EnzoBossi’s Albanian diploma scandal has led to everyone knowing publicly what most have suspected privately – Albanian private university diplomas are flowing out with few checks.
The government needs to shut down or increase supervision on private universities before they destroy the entire education system and the futures of young people.
