The higher education institutions’ ranking and the importance attached to many facets of this process – including the informative and guiding aspects – were the topic of the latest meeting between Prime Minister Edi Rama and rectors of public and non-public universities in the country, an event that took place at the Ministry of Education and Sports.

The government head praised the university rectors for their efforts and the encouraging steps towards the internalization of Albanian universities, pointing out significant progress in the efforts to gain access to the European research and innovation funding programmes. As to the university ranking process, the Premier put emphasis on the urge to meet all the requirements for a more decent spot on the overall ranking and closer to what the country’s academic capacities actually offer.

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Hello everyone! Thank you very much!

Before I can further elaborate on what I already mentioned, I would like to inform everyone, as we had discussed with the university rectors, at the first meeting of the recently-revealed European Political Community in Prague, I raised the issue of universities as a pressing issue that needs to be considered and tackled by the European Union, without waiting for Albania and other Western Balkan countries to join the bloc, and this means that we as candidate countries, already negotiating our membership with the EU, have partial access to the European system of the higher education and the relevant funding programmes. This is something you know better.

I will not take up too much of your time by providing facts and figures, but I would just draw your attention to a very significant figure and remarkable accomplishment achieved by the Tirana University that has significantly increased the number of beneficiaries from the EU research funding programmes to over 400 from just 50 previously. So, as many as 400 Tirana University lecturers and professors, or more than half of them – if I am not mistaken – have gained access to EU funding. This is an incredible achievement if we are to consider the extremely short time in which it happened and of course, is the direct impact of the new Tirana University management and the new approach that is gradually taking shape, regardless of its problems, and therefore our research funding capacity has increased significantly.

Our university system has more capacities than what the public opinion in general has been informed about as a result of a very long period of standstill and regress in handling the human resources.

This is now one of the most important education reform effects; it is one of the most important effects of this approach and the drive for internationalization. Building synergies and opening the doors to European universities here in Tirana, through our local universities, is the only future ahead of us.

The exponential growth in this last phase, both in terms of the shared curricula and in terms of the English language curricula, represent an initial step that needs to be accompanied by many more steps. However, this is really a very significant growth in this respect.

Again, I would like to commend Tirana University for the work done.

Going back to the main focus of this meeting, I would like to note that the reform as a result of the new higher education law is absolutely obvious as it is delivering an important impact on teaching methods, management and provision of fresh opportunities for the university students, all compared to the starting point of the higher education reform and not compared to where we should actually be.

The funding process itself also shows we are on the right direction, although a lot remains to be done in terms of making use of the university autonomy space, not merely as a space of freedom, but also as a space of high sense of responsibility.

The issue up for discussion today is that despite the real and tangible progress, precisely because our relationship with the future is still in inverse proportion, the ranking of Albanian universities on the global map, also due to a very long wasted time prior to the reform, is unacceptable, just unacceptable.

I would decline from going into further details. I would just like to say that this is a process we want to deliver together. We don’t want to deliver on it unilaterally, but jointly. In the same way, we should together address a very serious problem concerning the second phase of the reform. This is about European synergies, and this is just one side, the government is now the one to cooperate the international bodies and I personally, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education are the ones to bear the main responsibility again in the framework of the new European Political Community, because it is time to take this fundamental step for the future of education and not consider it as something that will only happen once the country becomes a European Union member, because another generation would be abandoned and denied the possible support, which is the support from the European Union, which is the support under  the higher education system funding provided by the European Union.

We must be prepared and we must work in a direction that, without taking anything away from anyone, to provide the due conditions for everyone to benefit more by becoming much more attractive, either for the internal market or for the European higher education system.