Albania’s Higher Education is displaying the signs of a crisis affecting all of its component parts: faculty, students, the teaching process as well as the leadership and managerial levels. To relieve the crisis, the government planned on instituting certain measures of a reforming nature. However, notwithstanding their positive intention, the amendments do not appropriately conform to the principles of university autonomy. For quite some time now, under NOSA’s priority area of Good Governance and Rule of Law, OSFA has been involved in efforts to identify options for the reformation of higher education in Albania. One of these efforts is a joint project between OSFA and the Institute for Contemporary Studies (ISC) to conduct a study of university management, including financial management, in Albania. The study introduces the new concept of financial autonomy for universities based on the need to strike a balance between freedom to administer financial resources and the rendering of accounts to the government and the public. The establishment of a financial council or simple management boards at every university is the core of proposals made in the study about rationalizing and maximizing the value of university allocations.

Parts of the study have now been published and have been distributed to the university communities, to the officials of the Ministry of Education and various civil society activists including the media. In addition, the findings and recommendations in the study have been presented in one of the workshops organized by NOSA in the framework of debates surrounding issues of university reformation in Albania. Interest groups and professional experts have valued positively the study and have expressed their regret over the Ministry’s indifference with regard to taking count of the best recommendations in the study.