Worthless College Degrees - A Critical Look at the Albanian Educational System

Alfred Kola

Among many aspects of the Albanian life, the higher education is perhaps the hardest-hit by corruption, recklessness and lack of quality. The country’s transition to a free-market economy necessarily required that new institutions of higher education be opened to provide adequate and updated knowledge and training for the population and thus help them to better adapt to the new system and meet the challenges of this transition head-on. But after the comeback to power of former president Sali Berisha and his party in 2005, private universities popped up like mushrooms without any regulations and virtually all of them fail to satisfy the basic standards of educational quality. All of the newly established institutions of higher education call themselves universities, even though they are poorly equipped one-building units. Most of them are smaller in terms of students’ number than a medium-sized high school in the United States, have few departments or faculties and offer limited numbers of academic programs. But even in these academic fields, the quality of knowledge is extremely poor, sometimes worse than a public high school and the professors lack the adequate teaching skills and academic qualifications. These universities are privately run, like for-profit businesses, whose net profit at the end of academic year must be guaranteed by the students’ high tuition. Since the revenues are provided by the students, they are considered as customers and are, therefore, graded favorably to keep them satisfied like any other business would do. The learning process, which they were created to provide, is not their main goal.

The number of these new universities ranges from 50 to 70 and most of them are located in Tirana. What strikes one as odd is the weird and sometimes funny names these universities have like: Planetary University of Tirana, International University of Tirana, UFO University or kindergarten-like names: Crystal University, Vitrine University etc.

The Albanian government follows policies that aim to downsize large and quality state universities, like the Tirana University, Polytechnic University of Tirana, Vlora University and others, whose curricula are integrated into a European standardized  system and their degrees are acknowledged and attested abroad , in favor of these private small unqualified institutions through unfair competition, fund cuts for state universities and, most of all, assigning the postgraduate studies only to private universities. Albanian government has a tight grip on the educational system in the country; it even determines the quotas of students who attend state universities and these private institutions are owned by government officials or their family members and relatives.

It is estimated that the number of admissions offered by the universities in Albania taken together is far larger than the number of high school graduates in a year, this meaning that all the graduates regardless of their GPA or final exams results will have the chance to go to college. Private universities do not have a GPA criterion for admission, since their main goal is profit-making not teaching and learning. Nevertheless, private higher education is massively rejected by good high school students, who highly prefer to go to state universities for their undergraduate studies.

This policy of “no one left without a college degree” pursued by the government has greatly unhinged the weak balance of the job market in Albania, because of sky high demands for bottom low employment offers for college graduates, what has led to high levels of corruption and kickbacks within the educational system.

Albania is a badly governed country, ranked among the poorest in the world, with an estimated unemployment rate at 50% of the labor force or higher, and the new private universities resemble a giant vacuum cleaner that is sucking lifetime savings of not very watchful Albanians.