By Alba Cela
It happens to many of us that upon opening our email accounts we see that annoying quantities of junk have accumulated in the Inbox section. What usually follows is a series of Shift-delete moves that clear up the view. But it also happens that some of this junk manages to attract the attention anyways. On such an occasion what I saw in my inbox went like this:
“Good News! Interested to obtain Bachelors’, Masters’, MBA’s, Doctorate & Ph.D. degrees available in your field in 2 weeks time?
It’s available now…Call Us and get yours today: +**-***-***-***
Our Education office has someone available 24 hours a day, 7 Days a
Week. Why waiting?”
This email apparently advertising some faux scheme of education got me thinking about the changes that are happening so quickly and developing out of control in the education field. The changes are of course global and relate to a new way of conduct and management but when it comes to narrowing down their dynamics in our region and even more to our country, the picture takes on different colors.
Quick and secure high education, education for all, pain-free, effort-free, just not money-free! This seems to be the real motto of private education enterprises, though it comes disguised in sophisticated marketing strategies.
Albanian parents are quite vulnerable to private education for a series of reasons. The infrastructure of public education in Albania is quite poor and the entrance procedures marred by corruption scandals. This comes coupled with a certain naivet顩n understanding the mechanisms of success in the capitalist economic realm and a determined love for knowledge instilled during the communist regime, however paradoxical this may sound. Hence usually families do not hesitate to spend their hard-won savings to pay the tuition fees of private schools. Theoretically private education should offer the best to the children of these parents. In reality, private education in Albania thrives inside a vacuum of control, unhampered by any quality checks by administration entities that should be responsible for it.
Both in Albania and in Kosovo the number of private education institutions as well as branches of dubious international schools has been increasing at an exponential rate. In Albania there are now
Currently there are fifteen private universities in Albania whose names range anywhere between serious and exotic: New York University, “Marin Barleti”, U.F.O University, “Zonja e Keshillit te Mire” (Catholic University), the European University of Tirana, Epoka, KRISTAL , “Parashqevi dhe Sevasti Qiriazi”, Marubi Cinematographic School, Aldent, Wisdom, Polis, Luarasi, Justicia, Justiniani I .
The last three offer only law education.
The list is expected to grow with application for license piling up in the offices of the Ministry of Education in Tirana.
Technical conditions in private universities are impeccable. Features such as well equipped computer labs, spacious rooms with proper lighting and heating systems, small number of students per class and availability of projectors for lectures give it a comparative advantage over the public university where over-jammed classes and outdated technological devices are significant obstacles to the proper contemporary education of students. Epoka University is the last comer into the field and advertisements throughout Tirana boast that every new student will be given a laptop.
However, very few of them are oriented to real market needs such as information technology or professional training. So indirectly they perpetuate instead of alleviating the unemployment problem.
In the wide spectrum of Albanian despair factors the poor quality of education is the most serious one since it is directly related to hope about the future and to progress. What both public and private high education institutions are generating right now is a mediocre generation. They are fostering as vicious cycle of irresponsibility, ignorance and nepotism. Students who do not have to care about attendance requirements, students whose writing style and language grammar goes ‘unnoticed’ even in exams, students who are tolerated up to absurdity by being given infinite second chances. And the students of today are going to be the managers, employees of tomorrow. The ones who study Political Science and International Relations aspire to reach the highest level of representation both at home and abroad. With a system that make the world look like a place where everything is possible why not?
What we are left to expect then in the most optimistic scenario is that the invisible hand of capitalism, that merciless competitive selection system, eventually gets rid of most of these schools once their customers realize the quality of the service they offer. Employers are also being warned that the diplomas in the application packages they get do not reflect the real background of the applicant. They have started to require trial periods and give assignments to check the capacities that those diplomas profess and they are getting disappointed. Beware, this has started! But it might as well take a while. In the meantime, our inboxes will be filled by emails like this and we will keep on pressing Shift-Delete.
