In a speech at the occasion of the 65th anniversary of the foundation of the Agricultural University in Tirana, Prime Minister Rama blamed the large number of unfilled student vacancies at public universities on the supposedly low test scores of high school students:
Failed students have annoyed us and parents have bothered us, a great fear has captured society because those with an average of 5.1 can’t get a diplomas to become lawyers, engineers, and professors.
Meanwhile, several rectors from the main universities in the country expressed their worries that universities still have unfulfilled student vacancies, while at the same time there are still many high school graduate with high averages who didn’t win the right to study in any of the departments.
The university officials blame the long procedures and the confusion caused by the new higher education law, which was passed before the summer. They declared that there still vacancies in many otherwise popular departments, such as pharmacy and architecture, and the economical, natural science, and polytechnical departments.
Being afraid to eventually lose in their preferred departments, many graduates didn’t wait for the later rounds in the allocation process, but registered early on at other, perhaps less preferred, departments to be sure of their position. Others registered at private universities with lower admission thresholds.
Arben Gjata, rector of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Tirana stated that:
A part of the student, being worried that they wouldn’t win, might have chosen alternative universities.
While Dhori Kule, rector of the Faculty of Economics commented that the formula as envisioned in the new law was not fair toward graduates, because in the economical faculty there were 63 unfilled vacancies.
All around the world universities are in charge of admissions. While this time, the university cannot do the admissions according to the law. … The process was unified and put in a centralized and unified structure. We [the universities] lost our competence to decide and select the students and they are now fall under an institution outside our competences. This is not correct.
