Since the
withdrawal of Serbian military, police and
government officials in June 1999, the UN, EU
and other international players have been
engaged with Kosovars to rebuild the necessary
institutional and legal capacities needed by a
modern economy and democracy. Much has
been achieved and more remains to be done with
the EU picking up more and more responsibility
as it engages in preparing Kosovo for potential
membership. There is however one
particular task that has been largely ignored
by both the government and its friends that is
critical if Kosovo is to achieve its objectives
of becoming a vibrant economy and stable
society. The youth of today and in the
coming years need to be trained and trained
well in the skills required by those
objectives. A growing pool of such skilled
potential workers would both attract investment
and enable Kosovars to compete in the modern
world of open borders and
competition.
The people of
Kosovo are well aware of the importance of
education to their children's and their
country's future. Having been excluded
from the formal school system under the
Milosevic regime, the Kosovar Albanians ran
their own informal parallel system with
considerable sacrifice and commitement.
Perhaps this engendered an even stronger
desire to have their children educated.
They enthusiastically sent they children
back to school as soon as possible after the
fighting ended in 1999. Other ethnic
communities with the exception of the Roma
displayed the same desire to get their children
back in the classroom. Damaged and
destroyed schools were repaired or replaced.
Many schools quickly installed computers
and computer literacy is now widespread.
Today fully sixty-six percent of young
Kosovars use the internet. Schools also
began to teach English in addition to the
language of the students, recognizing its
importance in today's world as a necessary tool
to interacting with the rest of the world.
Teacher training has been improved.
And attendance at school was made
mandatory up to the age of 16. Today
two-thirds of youth between 16 and 27 are in
high school, university and post-graduate
programs. But the education system still
has serious unresolved problems if the
aspirations of students and their parents and
the needs of the country are to be met.
Kosovo has Europe's youngest population.
Properly prepared they will be an asset
in developing the economy and burnishing
Kosovo's image as a potential EU member.
Failing to meet their needs and
expectations almost assuredly will result in
political destabilization down the road as
frustrations lead to radicalization.
The government has prepared a
comprehensive albeit somewhat mechanistic
five-year strategic plan (2011-2016) for the
education sector. It provides a guide for
investments of time and resources (roughly
Euros 80 million a year - note: Kosovo's
currency is the Euro even though it is not part
of the Euro zone) to expand and improve its
education system. Its goals are laudable
and the achievements over the past decade are
without doubt impressive given the magnitude of
the problems faced. The plan however admits
resources may not (read probably) meet targets.
There have also been excellent and expensive
consultant studies commissioned involving
international and local experts on various
aspects of the education system that provide
sage advice and plans. But to date these
studies tend to rest on office bookshelves
rather than being acted upon with any
vigor
Non-existent
is any effort to try to define what skills
Kosovo's future economy will need to achieve
economic growth and hence no directed plan on
how to produce those skills with the resources
at hand or likely to be at hand from domestic
revenues and international assistance.
Kosovo sits in the new Europe. All
its neighbors are in line for membership in the
EU. Kosovo is at the end of the line.
Opportunity is at its door but it has to
be able to take advantage of that opportunity.
Being able to grow its economy, run
public institutions effectively and adherence
to the rule of law are all criteria it needs to
improve upon, all helped by having qualified
people filling its public and private
organizations. Free trade with EU member
states beckons. But trade to be a benefit
requires producing goods to export, not just
importing. And Kosovo produces very
little with value added. But it can, if
it provides the right skills training and also
opens its economy to unhampered (by slow,
incompetent and/or corrupt institutions)
investment that can bring much needed expertise
and take advantage of those new skills to
develop productive industries and
businessess... and jobs. In fact Kosovo
has a couple of cutting edge businesses already
doing this but these had to supplement limited
local human resources by enticing Kosovars
working abroad to return. They are proof
of what can be done with skilled
workers.
While many
things remain to be done to upgrade the
education system up through high school, the
university level is where attention is most
needed immediately and where the greatest
dividends can be earned. The public
university system is the predominant provider
of education at that level although private
institutions have proliferated. There are some
24 active (out of 30 registered) private
institutions with 19,000 students, all but one
set up as for profit businesses.
Preeminent among them is the privately
established and run not for profit American
University of Kosovo which works in cooperation
with the University of Rochester in New York.
The American University is the university
of choice for those who can gain admittance and
afford its high cost. It provides quality
education.
But the
private schools are dwarfed by the student
numbers at the public institutions.
Center in that universe is the University
of Pristina, founded in 1969, which has 14
academic and 3 science faculties.
Pristina has a current student body of
over 47,000, up from only 25,400 in 2008, an
increase resulting from a political decision to
admit more students. (This decision may
have been in response to perceived demand or
cynically seen as a something to gain political
support. But it was ill advised in that the
university system was not prepared for such a
rapid expansion and compounds the problem of
providing quality education.) In 2011 it
awarded just under 4,500 bachelor's graduates
and 650 master's graduates. A new public
university with 8 faculties was established in
the southern city of Prizren in 2006. It
is projected to grow to 15,000 students by
2015. There is also a plan to open a
branch for some faculties of the University of
Pristina in the eastern city of Gjilan.
And a small public business school exists
in the city of Peja near the Montenegran border
in the west. Together the public system
is expected to represent by 2015 close to
65,000 students although it is common since the
2008 expansion for some students to register
but not take up their studies so the statistics
can be misleading. Regardless the number
is large.
The numbers
are indicative of the recognition by Kosovars
that education is very important to their
lives. The quality of public university
education however suffers. Faculty ratios
are thin, particularly due to the rapid
expansion. Pristina had 1023 faculty
members in 2012 and Prizren 109. These
numbers become even thinner when it is
recognized that most faculty moonlight,
teaching courses at the private schools to
supplement their incomes. Some teach at
as many as six other institutions! They
also practice a lucrative side business by
translating books to be used in their courses
into Albanian and forcing students to buy them.
And professors can be arrogant and
politically connected, making it difficult for
students and for internal management.
Stories abound of professors scheduling
critical exams and not showing up to administer
them until many hours later, making students
sit and wait. In one case a law student
waited from nine in the morning until seven in
the evening without access to food to take an
exam needed for his degree.
Comprehensive reform is needed
to turn this and other public institutions into
modern purveyors of quality education that
prepare students for a future working within a
world of business, government and academia
fitting to the new Europe and a world with
shrinking borders. Part of that reform
should include a shift - over time - to
teaching more in English, the working language
of Europe and international commerce. It is
also the key to accessing knowledge since much
source material is written in English.
Many schools in Europe are doing this,
even France's sacrosanct Science Po and
Holland's University of Utrecht provide
instruction in English for many courses.
Students also encounter a system where a
bribe rather than hard work is a route to a
good grade. They might be used to this
since the practice even occurs at the primary
school level!! The university system also
has to be de-politicized. This means that
politicians need to stop interfering in its
inner workings by using their influence on such
things as faculty and management appointments.
It is a common perception in Kosovo that
the University of Pristina faculty and
administration is a bastion of support for the
ruling party and probably was also for the
ruling party that preceded it. Removing
this perception or reality is necessary to give
the university and other pubic universities the
ability to manage their affairs much as public
universities in the U.S. and Europe function,
with government oversight but with considerable
latitude to handle their own affairs based on
what is needed to provide a good education.
Reform also should be based on an
assessment of what skills a future Kosovo will
need to become the modern state it aspires to
be and be able to compete in economically.
Also to be considered is that for Kosovo
to become a true democracy requires qualified
graduates. Indicative of government's
recognition of this is the fact that many of
its own organizations prefer to hire foreign
graduates when possible.
The required reform can be
carried out by a concerted program over a
number of years with international assistance
in the form of financial support and access to
academic and management expertise from abroad.
Donors should not shirk from doing this
although taking on this task is equivalent to
cleaning the Augean stables. The problems
are complex and entrenched. Prior to
undertaking any such reform however, a donor or
donors would need to require an irrevocable
commitment from the government and the
universities to follow through on agreed
reforms. Such a program could include
inter alia opportunities given to current and
new faculty to upgrade their skills by either
sabbaticals or degree training at foreign
universities/courses. This in turn might
require external professors brought in to fill
temporarily empty slots while staff is away.
Different universities abroad might be
engaged to mentor certain faculties within
Kosovar universities and thus engender an
on-going relationship even after the assistance
program ends. Course offerings may need
to be revamped to fit the conclusions of the
future assessment of skills needs, a key step
before proceeding. And a link should be
established whereby the students and faculty
can access one or more of the better online
American or European university libraries to
reinforce their studies and/or research.
Input also would be needed to reform the
administrative structure and management that
currently are inadequate, indeed inappropriate,
to the operations of a modern university.
Undoubtedly much else will be
required but more examination is needed than
can be given here. But there should be no
doubt that the task is urgent. Nibbling
on the edges by sending a few people abroad to
study each year, as is now done by various
programs, will not achieve what is needed and
certainly not in time.
Kosovo now has a situation
equivalent to sitting on a time bomb (the
already large and burgeoning young population
which has aspirations of a university education
and the expected good jobs to follow) with the
timer fuse having been activated (the
government's action of dramatically increasing
student intake combined with the reality that
jobs will not exist in sufficient numbers and
in time to meet raised expectations). As
noted above, this can only lead to future
political instability and/or radicalization.
All that the international community has
done to help Kosovo will have been compromised.
More importantly the hopes of Kosovo's
people for a better life for themselves and
their descendents will have been destroyed.
Rapid and decisive action is needed to
defuse this by investing quickly in the
modernization of the public university system
to improve its management and the quality and
appropriateness of the skills it gives its
graduates. This also has to go together
with making Kosovo a business/investor friendly
environment. That task is underway but
will be aided if potential business investors,
domestic and foreign, know qualified graduates
will become available. The bomb is
ticking.
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