In her remarks at Thursday’s plenary session of Parliament, the Minister of Education and Sports Evis Kushi provided explanations over online news reports a day ago over global ranking of universities.

Education Minister Kushi clarified it is about a university ranking based on the data content posted on the websites of the universities and not on the official information provided by the educational institutions themselves. 

“The news about the university ranking based on the data posted on the web content, an initiative launched by Spanish research group Cybermetrics Lab and aims at carrying out a quantity analysis of the content of posts on the websites of the universities. So, the data collected by this group are retrieved from the websites of the universities across the world and not through cooperation with Albanian universities or other Albanian institutions. The aim is to motivate researchers and scholars to be as active and present as possible on the online sites of their institutions,” Kushi said.

Education Minister announced that Albania now ranks among the 400 best universities in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, represented by three universities, namely Tirana University, Agricultural University and Epoka University.

“The Albanian universities should definitely become more active and present via their official websites, but if we are to rank them based on their quality we should then refer to the official rankings across the world and it is about ranking of 400 top universities in Europe. For the first time Albania is included in the best ranking in 2020, initially with Tirana University, and in 2021 with five universities and this year with 3 universities, the Agricultural University, Tirana University and Epoka University,” Education Minister concluded.