Seven months after Tirana Times cover story investigated the private higher education system in Albania, calling for stronger supervision, diploma mill accusation has hit one of the largest private universities, prompting a national debate.
Tirana Times
TIRANA, May 10 – The son of an Italian politician has 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, an investigation by Italian and Albanian authorities shows.
The revelation has revived the debate about the quality of Albanian private university diplomas which critics say are often obtained by fraud and under little supervision by Albanian education officials in charge of guarding the quality of the country’s higher education system.
Italian media were first to report thatRenzo Bossi, the son of far-right, anti-immigrant politician Umberto Bossi, who had led the Lega Nord party for many years,graduated from Tirana-based Kristal University. Albanian border police told the local media no Italian citizen by that name had ever entered the country. Bossi’s program also required a nominal three-year term for studies, but the diploma appears to have been issued in one year, local media reported.
Italian and Albanian prosecutors are now investigating the case due to suspicioun the diploma was obtained in a corruptive manner and paid for with taxpayer money, Italian and Albanian media reported.
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.
“Burned by the pyramid schemes of the 1990s, Albanians are falling for another money pit as the number of new private universities mushrooms,” the Nov. 11, 2011 article noted.
It also questioned how serious these private institutions were, raising concern that they might be simply for-profit diploma mills, a form of a pyramid scheme in the education that would strongly hurt Albanian students prospects for employment here and abroad.
Tens of private universities have mushroomed in Albania in the past few years and are now a huge business for their owners.
For years, there have been rumors that diplomas at some universities could simply be bought, even without having a high school degree. Now there are facts too. The local media reported 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.
Political implications
The matter became a point a discussion in parliament as the oppositionSocialists demanded Education Minister Myqerem Tafaj should report to parliament on how private universities in the country are currently being supervised.
ValentinaLeskaj, a leading Socialist member of parliament, wants the minister to report in front of the commission she leads. “It is a matter of a reputation, but this is also a dangerous phenomenon for the Albanian society, this issue of selling diplomas. It is the second case that goes to prosecutors,” Leskaj said.
These suspicious diplomas have been getting into the political system too, says Black and Red Alliance leader Kreshnik Spahiu. In a rally he told supporters that if the party comes to power it would make it mandatory for all politicians to provide full details about their education and the way they obtained it.
A Ministry of Education spokesperson said that a group of inspectors has started work to investigate the practices of several private universities, with Kristal University featured on the list. But reaction from the Ministry of Education has been tepid and very little information has been provided.
This latest scandal is one more headache the government doesn’t want to deal with at this time, a local analyst tells Tirana Times.
In a statement, Kristal University, said Bossi showed up in the school registers as a student who had registered just like any other foreign student can do in Albanian universities. But Albanian border police data, which track every person that enters and leaves the country, show the younger Bossi has never been to Albania, leading to suspicions he simply paid for the diploma.
The irony of Renzo Bossi’s Albanian diploma
Bossi’s father, Umberto, is well-known in Albania as one of the harshest opponent to the immigrants in Italy, with calls that they should be kicked out of the country. At one point in 2003 he said the Italian navy should use machine guns and cannons against immigrant boats.
There are officially half a million Albanian immigrants in Italy, many of which arrived as desperate boat people in the early 1990s, creating a hard-working and well-established community that exists today.
Umberto Bossi has resigned from all the posts following a series of scandals that showed he illegally exploited public money.
The irony is evident in the Italian coverage of this latest news story. “Bossi gets non EU diploma,” quipped one headline.
Irony aside, criminal prosecutors are now involved in this case, in both Albania and Italy.
The Tirana Prosecution Office has seized a series of documents at Kristal University and will perform full checks to see if there is any criminal wrongdoing.
Italian investigators suspect that two Kristal diplomas found in an office by Italian police were obtained using Lega Nord money, which would be illegal. The Bossi document shows he had received 482 credits after attending 29 classes, with the best marks in financial accounting, mathematics and statistics.
A system in crisis
In Tirana, ads for the private universities are everywhere – the streets, newspapers and on television. They have flashy mottos and big euro signs. There is only one catch – students enrolling in these universities and prospective employers don’t know how much the diplomas will be worth in the job market when they finish.
Notorious for the herd mentality that led Albanians to fall for the pyramid schemes of the 1990s and lose all their life savings, Albanians could be falling for another money and time pit – diplomas of suspect quality issued by the mushrooming number of new private universities. And in this case the consequences go beyond financial implications: they could result in a generation of undereducated college graduates heading straight for unemployment.
A high demand for higher education that originally couldn’t be met by public universities is driving the trend to open up private universities. But the market has clearly gone from empty to oversaturated. While there is no doubt a few of these universities will continue on to become fine institutions of higher learning, large questions loom about the quality of the rest.
The top public universities like the University of Tirana get the cr鮥 of the crop of Albanian students who don’t study abroad. The UT selection is done through testing. The rest choose private universities either because they can get in and graduate no matter how much effort they put into it, or on the rarer occasion, because they believe they can get a better or more specialized education.
University of Tirana students took the streets this week, protesting the damage done to the reputation of Albanian universities from private diploma mills.
Getting a diploma through corruptive means is a very negative assumption heard over and over again by employers, particularly foreign ones. They are worried many Albanian graduates are unqualified because they bought up the good grades and diplomas through corrupting professors, even in public universities. Implications of a bad education are far worse than those of a bad cup of coffee.
The boom in private universities is not simply an Albanian problem, it’s a regional one, notes Florian Bieber, a professor at the Center for South East European Studies of the University of Graz in Austria. But Albania does lead the pack with its exceptionally high number of private universities.
