TIRANA, March 1 – The Albanian government has hired a British agency to rank the quality of some 35 public and private universities in the country as part of ongoing reform in the education system culminating in 2014 with the closure of more than a dozen of so-called pyramid schemes of education. U.K.-based Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) will be paid a reported €700,000 to conduct the ranking.
The process will kick off in March with the first six universities, four public and two private, to undergo institutional reviews, and it is expected to be finalized by September 2017 when detailed findings for each higher education institution will be published.
Prime Minister Edi Rama considered the signing of the agreement as “the end to an era which saw education as a business” and backed his government’s decision to close about a third of private universities in June 2014.
“This was a system which awarded 32,000 diplomas, half of which issued by a single university and it cost Albanian parents 148 million Euros,” the Prime Minister said.
Rama added that 900 foreign nationals have obtained diplomas from these universities, despite the courses being available only in Albanian, clear evidence that these universities were nothing more but diploma mills.
Back in 2012, the debate over accreditation reached its peak when media revealed that Renzo Bossi, the son of an Italian politician had obtained a private university degree licensed by the Albanian Ministry of Education without ever stepping foot in Albania or attending the needed three-year term.
Before the firestorm caused by the Bossi case, Tirana Times was among the first media outlets to raise strong concerns about the quality of private higher education in Albania.
Education Minister Lindita Nikolli said the UK company was picked because of the country’s reputation for providing high quality education.
“Having observed the quality of higher education in the UK, the education ministry decided to look at the UK model for best practice in quality assurance,” Nikolli said.
QAA experts will assist Albania’s quality assurance agency to review all 35 of its higher education institutions.
Expectations from the new rating remain mixed as public universities offering a limited number of students are already favoured over private universities which almost accept everybody if they pay the registration fees. Both public and private universities are often the second choice for those who can afford to study abroad.
The reform of the higher education sector has been one of the priorities of the Socialist-led government since taking power in September 2013.
Several private universities were closed in 2014 after they were found to not meet even minimal quality standards.
PM Rama himself labeled these higher education institutions as pyramid schemes in education drawing parallels with the Ponzi schemes that robbed Albanians of life savings in 1997.
Albania had gone from having no private universities a decade ago to more than 40 private universities and professional colleges today. It had a mere 17 private universities in 2009. The rest had sprang out since then, according to data by Albania’s Public Agency for Accreditation of Private Higher Education. By comparison, there are only 10 public universities.
Another government strategy has also been that of promoting vocational training as a more viable alternative for employment compared to university degrees that hold little value in the job market.
