Albanian Higher Education Quality Assurance Reforms and Policy Convergence within the European Higher Education Area (2014-2019)
Albanian Higher Education Quality Assurance Reforms and Policy Convergence within the European Higher Education Area (2014-2019)

Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on the quality assurance reforms that higher education in Albania has undertaken during the timeframe 2014-2019 in regard to implementing the standards and guidelines of the European Higher Education Area. Albania is a candidate country and it has been making a continuous effort to become a member of the EU; thus, Europeanization is been used as a theoretical framework to analyse policy changes. The research aims to analyse what Europeanization approach the domestic reforms have pursued, based on the mechanisms, veto points and the outcomes of the Europeanization process. Moreover, through empirical findings on the Albanian quality assurance system, it attempts to define the extent to which these reforms comply with European standards and guidelines (ESG). Europeanization of the educational policies is guided by causal mechanisms with non-binding stimuli; thus, socialization, much more in the terms of instrumental learning, is defined as the main mechanism of the Europeanization approach of Albanian quality assurance. The policy convergence is mostly happening as an internalization of the rules regarding changing the policy means, not the policy ends, which produces only a formal absorption of ESG and not a substantial transformation of the system.

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