Access versus Quality in Albania’s Higher Education System: A Necessary Trade-Off?

The end of World War Two marked the start of significant changes in higher education access for most of European and North American countries. The rapid enrolment expansion witnessed in Western Europe and North America resulted in mass higher education at the turn of the 21st century. By contrast, an “elite higher education” policy was embraced by Central and Eastern European countries as part of the central planning logic pursued by the respective communist regimes. The dramatic political changes during the late 1980s provided the thrust for most of the Central and Eastern European countries to expand enrolment in higher education and reach mass higher education figures at the end of the 1990s. However, many shortcomings in infrastructure, curricula, teaching staff, budget support and state surveillance accompanied by increasing trends of corruption suggested that the quality of higher education in these countries has declined due to enrolment expansion. Unlike most of Central European countries, Albania started to expand enrolment in higher education only at the beginning of 2000s. Thus, this paper aims to explore the factors behind the differing enrolment patterns in Albania’s higher education system observed in the 1990s and 2000s. Furthermore, it assesses the effects of the relatively ‘late’ enrolment expansion on the quality of education provided by Albania’s higher education system in the 2001-2008 period.