Prime Minister Edi Rama’s remarks at launch event of the 2019 National Student Survey to gauge teaching and learning quality:
I am not going to deliver a long speech since it could be useful to provide the opportunity each and every one who wishes to make questions or express an opinion, but I would like to highlight that this is – the latest in a series of meetings as part of a very important process in the wake of the student protest in last December and continues as a constructive interaction through a series of new mechanisms designed not only to address the concerns voiced during the student protest, but also to strengthen cooperation between the government and the university in view of correct reading of our decision and proper understanding of the things we should determine and press ahead together.
Indeed, I am pleased to say that our commitments under the Pact on University document have been monitored and are being seriously and persistently monitored primarily by the Minister of Education and then the whole cabinet and it we were to take a look to each of these commitments we would find that several aspects have been already addressed, while work is intensively underway to ultimately deliver on many other aspects too. We have actually delivered on some of the main commitments whilst we are working to meet other pledges, not because the process is limited and has an end, but because all these would provide new basis for the university’s internal life, as well as for the cooperation between the government and the university.
The National Student Survey is significant for 1001 reasons, but it is primarily important as a new mechanism for every student to express their opinions and for reading these opinions on a scientific basis. The Survey would help us to understand more and to address the concerns of the whole student community more effectively.
Indeed, we are currently setting some crucial milestones that Europe has already set long time ago, but I would like to remind you all that we embarked on this path when the country’s universities faced a jungle-like situation, with the Albanian university community being completely out of control and facing a whole set of serious problems and a scandalously high record number of private universities that had been licensed without respecting any criteria and absorbed the parents’ money in exchange of a completely useless diploma.
The higher education law is working and is allowing us to address all these aspects, just like the interaction with university students is also working and is providing us the opportunity to speed up implementation of a number of projects without losing the quality of mechanisms we are making recently operational.
The most recent mechanism was revealed just few days ago and that is the student card due to be distributed in Tirana within May. The card will initially grant students access to some 40 public services, but this is a developing instrument, meaning it will include many more public services and more benefits to students.
A positive element of the student card I believe will steadily develop in the near future is the involvement of the private entrepreneurship to deliver on concrete commitments to serve students. I am talking about agreements with certain private sector companies in services sector that have already express readiness to mull over lower fees and prices for student card holders.
I won’t go over details of other aspects as I believe you have been already informed about them, but if more information is needed a system of online communication between the government and each student has been launched via specific section on the co-governance platform Albania We Want, the transparency mechanism on the university activities through a dedicated portal, the digital library already made available to students and university professors alike, featuring hundreds of thousands of scientific editions, while work is underway to build and improve the university infrastructure. All the needs have been already identified and work on implementation of concrete projects has kicked off and I am confident that initial bids for the infrastructure projects will be hopefully launched by autumn to build lecture halls, laboratories, the university campuses etc.
It will be a major historic investment by the Albanian government in the university infrastructure. The funding volume earmarked to support this transformation will be larger than any investments in the university infrastructure over the past 30 years combined and we believe these projects will complete in the next two or three years and the university infrastructure will be substantially transformed.
–An online portal has been launched by Tirana’s Polytechnic University to conduct a survey of each lecturer’s performance at end of each semester and academic year. What concerns me most is that despite the students’ broad participation in the survey as we all fill in the online questionnaire and express fair opinions, yet no decision is made neither by the University, nor by the Ministry of Education or the Rectorate. This is what concerns me regarding the new survey. Will there really be working teams, commissions that will assess the findings of the survey?
PM Rama: There is a huge difference between the letters you have written and this survey, the letters you have written – and I believe you know quite well the authors of these letters as they can be counted on the fingers of hands – and have been sent to the Dean, or the Rectorate, but you have received no reply to your letters, or you have received replies that offer no solutions at all.
Meanwhile, what we are doing now is being done for the very first time ever. It is a colossal data volume as it is about over 110 000 respondents who are not merely asked whether “there are corruption practices in the university”, but instead they are being asked about a broader set of questions that have been formulated scientifically to gain a maximum from the collection of your opinions that will then become all available to the public. It is a huge difference between this survey and the letters you mentioned. The survey’s results on the university and each individual university or faculty will be made public. The academic personnel, professors, lecturers, the university secretariats and us as decision-makers in the government will all face the students’ opinion. It is something that has nothing to do with what you have already done previously.
It is a clear-cut democracy exercise that will trigger debates and clear commitments, because based on the findings of the surveys, which will include everyone and which I hope everyone will contribute to, and once the findings are publicly released to the parents, the students themselves, the university officials and the government then it would be very difficult to hide from several significant truths on which the already launched transformation will be based in the future. It is a completely different thing. I don’t know how important is to be or not to be sceptical. I know it is important this 15-minute exercise should be carried out. What we would be able to achieve and capitalize from all this huge data volume is part of a debate that will ensue, yet this way we provide the entire university community the opportunity to speak up.
Just as in the entire activity of the society there is a very simple truth that there is always a silent majority that is not heard and which one cannot read by guessing through talks in a coffee bar or the debates in the salons of media evenings. It is a silent majority that can be figured out through surveys and instruments which reveal the opinion of the society as a whole. Therefore, this is a very useful exercise for all of us. It is useful for the university, for the government, for parents who invest in their children’s education and for every one of you, as well as for the university officials and academic personnel. This is undisputable. What it should be done in this case is that everyone participates in this survey because the more data are collected the more we draw closer to the truth about the students’ perception in all respects.
As for the university administrative boards, it is crucially important that students participate in the selection process. We have called for three student candidates in order to provide students the opportunity to have their representatives, but the government will of course will pick among the three candidates because of a very simple principle: the administrative board is the guarantor of the entire financial activity, primarily in the university, and the government is the one to provide funding and as such it should monitor how money is spent by the university, as long as the government is the main funder, as it is the case all over the world. This has to do with nothing else but the need to oversee the funding and ensure transparency.
The transparency portal, which has been made available to everyone, makes sure that everyone knows exactly how much and how the money is spent by the faculty he or she is attending. These are changes that though not colossal ones, yet they altogether form the basis for a future colossal transformation. Never forget where we started from. We started everything from a jungle of “Vitrina” and “Kristal” universities. The graduates from those so-called universities are today the embodiment of the victim of a jungle system, because their parents invested their savings, yet the diploma their kids received is useless as these graduates are merely jobless.
We have left that time far behind. It seems as if those universities existed 100 years ago, but they were a reality just four years ago. I fully agree with what that young boy said that time flies so fast and when these all projects complete and yield their results he will no longer be a student. Of course, it is all about building a whole system and systems can’t be built in four years only. It is impossible. Should systems be built like that, then the world would have been elsewhere, but it has taken hundreds of years for such systems to build in the world’s most developed part too. Meanwhile, this is a new experience for us. Of course there should be 1001 of reasons not to be satisfied, because everything could always be done better and faster. The protest was definitely a very significant impetus because this is what makes democracy the best yet not most perfect system amid the system the humanity has experienced to date.
The government doesn’t have the monopoly of truth and it doesn’t possess knowledge on everything. On the contrary, the government is there to best embody the society’s knowledge about an issue or a sector. We have actually embarked on a process that certainly originates from the student protest. Not because it was impossible to all these things, but it was impossible to do them within such a short period of time and they wouldn’t have been done under a document of commitments like the Pact on University and they wouldn’t have been done so persistently like today just because we weren’t intensively focused on these issues prior to the protest.
What has happened is a very positive development because you can stage protests and nobody may give heed to your plight, but a synergy has been created between you and us in this case. So the task of addressing your concerns falls upon us and we endeavour to do our best in order to make sure such concerns are tackled in the best way and as fast as possible, yet everything take time to complete.
Building a reliable, stable and qualitative education system is not just a word away and it neither something that begins and ends with writing a letter, but it is a process of historic transformation that takes years. However, if the today’s university is much better than it used to be few years ago, yet it is absolutely not the university it should be in the future.
If we are to turn our head and look back to where students were just five years ago, of course you enjoy today a much favourable position compared to them, but if we are to look ahead and see where students must be five years later, then of course the today’s situation leaves no room for complacency.
What does the survey do?
Actually it won’t reveal things we have no idea of what has happened, yet it would help us create a clear picture of the internal situation in the entire student community in relation to every aspect of the university as a whole and each individual faculty independently.
What is going to happen?
You will be seeing for yourselves that more positive perceptions will emerge in certain faculties and more negative ones in certain faculties. So it is not something uniformly. The survey won’t offer same findings, suggesting for example that zero corruption practices are to be found in the specialization programs at the University of Medicine. A system has been built in collaboration with the University officials since we launched the medicine specialization programme and I can openly state that not a single complaint over possible corruption actions has been filed to date. It is a system build on the basis of an objective evaluation of all candidates and applicants for the specialization program.
Was it an epicenter of corruption before it was closed down?
Yes, it was a hotbed of corruption. At some point, the situation was such that it was better to close it down rather than to try and find a solution to this mishmash. Zero corruption in university admission. Why? Nobody is now able to enter the university instead of someone else just because he or she has deep pockets, or enjoys support of a political party of influential people. It is no longer possible to enter the university this way because a merit-based system is now implemented in the university admission process. Everything takes place based on an objective result via a digital platform that knows nobody and doesn’t know who your father or mother is or whether you have deep pockets.
Why did I provide these examples? Because I am convinced that various answers will be provided to this question in various faculties. I don’t think that students of a certain faculty will all say that zero corruption practices take place in our faculty. I believe they will acknowledge that corruption phenomenon has been significantly reduced compared to other faculties. What results it will yield? The survey’s findings will help us to go over details and figure out why corruption perception is higher in certain faculties and lower in other faculties. The faculty officials and lecturers will be then held accountable. This is an exercise that strengthens the student’s position. You may write as many letters as you want. You have done and will continue to do so, but you will never receive a reply. What are you going to do then? What you know to do is to promptly blame the government. But the higher education law stipulates for the university’s autonomy.
Universities no longer depend on the government. The government has the duty and the right to oversee the funding provided through the administrative board. The government has the duty and the right to have its say on a series of other aspects, but it has absolutely no opportunity to interfere.
Who is going then to safeguard the student in the face of a non-qualitative or wore irresponsible management of the university?
Students will be guaranteed by transparency and confrontation of facts and actual data on the academic personnel.
Why we are insisting on the launch of student evaluation mechanism of lecturer performance?
Was this one of the students’ demands during the protest or not?
For the same reason. Encountering a corruption practice or being forced to involve in a corruption action is a thing, but a lecturer facing the student evaluation on his performance and questioning his integrity is something else.
It is not us to invent all these mechanisms, because they have been already implemented by the rest of the world long time ago. The French have built the national observatory of student life decades ago.
What the France’s national observatory of student life is?
The national observatory of the student life is exactly a mechanism to provide the most complete, detailed and objective information possible on students’ satisfaction of service they are provided with.
How satisfied are the students for the service they receive? They are satisfied in all respects.
The national observatory of student life is the result of a process that began back in 1968 following the French student protests. The observatory was actually created 30 years ago, but it started in 1968, and a consensus among the EU member states was reached back then to introduce such instruments that are not merely democracy instruments, but also instruments to verify education and teaching quality.
Therefore, I can confidently state that what we are doing as part of this process today will yield gradual results. The digital library is a reality by now, while the quality parameters are later results that will be gradually achieved. What is gone and what has been damaged over all these years cannot be restored. However, we should continue on the path we have cleared few years ago and build a functioning system that ensures learning and teaching quality.
