Academics fear the “collapse” of the Georgian higher education system if the government goes ahead with reforms that will reduce programme lengths, significantly restrict the admission of international students, and close down university faculties around the country.

Under the proposed changes announced by prime minister Irakli Kobakhidze, bachelor’s programmes will be shortened from four to three years and master’s from two to one, while childhood education will be reduced from 12 to 11 years.

A “one city – one faculty” approach will result in significant cuts to the number of university departments across the country, with the government determining which faculties may continue to operate them, while departments themselves must be run by full professors, working with a limited number of associate and assistant professors. State universities will only be able to admit international students in “exceptional”, legally defined circumstances.

Announcing the reforms, Kobakhidze said they aim to tackle “challenges”, including the “irrational use of academic resources and uneven quality of teaching in universities”, a “weak connection between teaching and research”, misalignment with labour market needs and “a faulty financing system and faulty infrastructure of state universities”.

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The reforms, Kobakhidze said, will establish a “qualitatively different system of higher education in our country, which will be in line with modern standards”.

But Tamar Tsopurashvili, a philosophy professor at Ilia State University, said “the biggest concern is that after this reform, the Georgian education system will collapse”. If years are cut from childhood and university education, she said: “Our educational system will not be harmonised with Western educational systems any more, and it will cause isolation of universities and of students, [harming] their chances to access exchange programmes like Erasmus+.”

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The “one city – one faculty” approach will severely limit student choice, Tsopurashvili said, and many students “will not have university access” altogether. Restricted opportunities for researchers, meanwhile, will result in “a high probability that well-educated people will leave the country, causing a brain drain”.

Sandro Tabatadze, assistant professor in political science at Tbilisi State University, said the reforms will see “professors who are not politically loyal to the ruling party be kicked out very easily”.

Tsopurashvili further predicted that the restrictions on international students would increase financial pressure on universities. “International students pay twice the fees of Georgian students, which gives state universities some finances to improve their infrastructure and makes them more independent from the state,”

Limiting universities’ ability to admit international students, she said, “is a financial attack on university autonomy” intended to increase “political control”.

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At present, medical courses are particularly popular with international students, with Georgian universities offering internationally accredited programmes in medicine. If state universities are forced to significantly limit their intake, Tabatadze said, “private universities will gain with this reform, because they can take more and more medical students”.

Government scrutiny of universities intensified in the wake of , he noted, in which students played a prominent role. “After that, a lot of [ruling party] Georgian Dream supporters said there is a systematic problem when it comes to universities,” he said, with prime minister Kobakhidze – himself a former professor at Tbilisi State – pledging to “clean them up”.

Balázs Trencsényi, a professor in the Central European University’s department of historical studies, also said that the developments in Georgia should not be seen as an isolated case, noting similar crackdowns on student protest in countries such as Serbia.

He said there had previously been an “illusion” that “autocratic regimes”, particularly in Eastern Europe, were “not necessarily interested in disrupting higher education because they are in need of a certain kind of educated elites”.

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“There was a kind of compromise that many of these countries seem to have been experiencing, and then at some point this compromise broke,” Trencsényi said. “This attack [on higher education] became much more direct.”

emily.dixon@timeshighereducation.com