Burned by the pyramid schemes of the 1990s, are Albanians falling
for another money pit as the number of new private universities mushrooms?
By: Andi Balla
The business of higher education is booming in Albania. And it’s a story of feast after a long famine. The country has gone from having no private universities a decade ago to 39 private universities and professional colleges today. It had a mere 17 private universities in 2009. Twenty-two have sprung out in the past two years alone, according to data by Albania’s Public Agency for Accreditation of Private Higher Education. By comparison, there are only 10 public universities.
As the new academic year is about start, the 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.
Chasing success
In the mid-1990s, a dentistry clinic opened up in downtown Tirana sporting a flying saucer in its sign, and it’s now famous name – U.F.O. As the business grew, the folks who ran the clinic, one of Tirana’s best at the time, noted the massive need for new dentistry technicians, so they opened a school to facilitate their training. The school inherited the name of the clinic, then expanded to become U.F.O. University, a private institution licensed in April 2004 by Albania’s Ministry of Education to teach all matter of subjects – from dentistry to law and economics.
The marketing department at the school finally understood they had a problem with the flying alien name, officially changing it to a Latin concoction of words that still spelled U.F.O. (Universitas Fabrefacta Optime). This year, they changed the name again, to Albanian University, and English name for a university where teaching and studying is done in Albanian.
Judging by its bustling campus in downtown Tirana, Albanian University today is a success story in attracting a large number of students. In addition to its presence in downtown Tirana, it is building a massive American-style campus in the southern city of Berat and even runs its own television station, UTV.
The success of places like U.F.O. University has attracted massive attention of others who want to profit from the trend. The numbers are growing, but the names are not getting any less imaginative. Some are inspired by the names of jewels and shopping windows while others continue with the proven lucky sci-fi theme, like the Planetary University of Tirana, a name that would make potential employers cringe when seen on a CV.
From the most recent data available, in the past five years, attendance at private universities in Albania has gone from 983 to 12,166, according to Open Data Albania. The number this year will probably jump higher.
A recent study by the Albanian Institute for International Studies shows how Albanians perceptions about education have changed in the past 20 years. Lutfi Dervishi, a local analyst, says 20 years ago the number of those who graduated Albanian universities was always smaller than those who registered in the first year. On a good year it might have been nearly equal, but rarely; while today he notes that the number of those graduating from private universities is higher than first-year student registration, an ironic turn of events even if transfer students are taken into consideration.
Quality concerns
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.
Public university professors often teach at the private universities too to make more money, and in some cases they teach at three or four universities at the same time.
A Tirana University professor who spoke to us on the condition we wouldn’t reveal his name says he has taught in private universities in the past, but had declined to do so in the future due to the poor quality of the students.
“The quality of students just isn’t there in the low tier private universities,” says the professor. “I’d be trying to explain complicated concepts while the students wanted to talk about how much money they lost at the bookies in last night’s football match.”
He adds private university professors feel pressured to give passing grades to unqualified students because the high cost the students are paying to attend the university makes them feel entitled to good grades and a diploma. That, he says, spells trouble when these students will meet the job market tomorrow.
“Everyone realizes that so far those who come with foreign degrees have a leg up in the job market. Graduates of state universities come in second. The private university diplomas, with the exception of a couple of well-established universities, come in last,” says the UT professor.
It is an 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.
Employers doing simple due diligence on potential employees with diplomas from certain universities would be advised first to go have a look at the websites. Judging by web-presence alone, many schools just don’t meet the smell test. Aldent University, which became a full university in 2008 and advertises heavily on television, for example, claims to be one of the leading schools in Europe for dentistry and nursing. Yet its website is amateurish at best, where only the homepage is available with a glorified description of the school’s history and credentials; while every other link (of which there are many) reveals an empty page with no information. The list goes on with other examples like Wisdom University נwhich boasts “a prestigious institution which contributes in an effective manner to the amazing Land of Eagles.” Yet, the website makes it look like the university is a side-kick to a private high school and the website itself is extremely hard to navigate, full of broken links.
Albanian analysts like libertarian Adri Nurellari, who is a strong proponent of loose regulations for private universities, argue that universities should indeed be treated like any product in the market and the students like consumers. Quality will rise to the top, Nurellari notes in his blog, while the rest will be set aside.
But things are not that simple because the implications of a bad education are far worse than those of a bad cup of coffee.
A regional problem
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.
“It seems like the Balkans are producing more universities than anybody could (or should) consume. Throughout most countries of the region, there has been a boom of new private (and state-run) universities,” Bieber writes in his blog.
He adds few would argue that advancing higher education is not a good idea, especially in a region where the ratio of university graduates is below the European average.
“It is also not bad in principle to have private universities. However, considering that there are approximately as many private universities in the region than in the entire European Union (minus Romania which also has dozens of private universities) together (around 100, mostly very small institutions: Austria 13, Germany 83, UK 1, Hungary 1, Netherlands 1, Portugal less than 10, most other countries none or single digits), there might be a bit of an oversupply. Thus, considering the limited resources, both in terms of funding for students to pay tuition and in terms of potential teachers, the number in the Balkans is striking.”
While Bieber agrees that some of the institutions are certainly on their way to establish themselves as serious places of higher learning, he also notes that “many others have a distinctly dubious ring.”
Anastasia Nazarko contributed to this story.
