1. Introduction and Scope

Integrity in higher education is a governance issue as much as an ethical one. In public universities, corruption does not appear only through overt acts such as bribery or improper exchange, but also through weaker forms of accountability, blurred responsibilities, informal influence, and procedures that exist on paper but are not trusted in practice. For that reason, assessing corruption in higher education requires more than listing legal violations. It requires examining whether institutions have workable mechanisms for prevention, reporting, and follow-up.

This report focuses on Albanian public universities and maps the main rules, structures, and practices that shape institutional integrity. It reviews the legal and regulatory framework relevant to ethics, whistleblowing, public accountability, procurement, and university governance, and considers how these norms are reflected in internal university procedures. The analysis also draws on university regulations, public records, media reporting, and civil society materials, alongside qualitative evidence gathered through consultations and interviews.

The report combines a system-level overview with a narrower field-based component. The desk research addresses the broader Albanian public higher education framework, while the qualitative findings are limited to documented evidence from Korça and Shkodra. This distinction is methodologically necessary: national obligations can be assessed across the sector, but interview-based findings must remain tied to the locations from which evidence was actually collected.

The analysis is organized around three core questions: what mechanisms exist to prevent corruption, how can suspected misconduct be reported, and what institutional response follows once concerns are raised? These questions make it possible to evaluate not only whether formal safeguards exist, but whether they function in a way that is visible, accessible, and credible for students, lecturers, and university staff.

2. Methodology and Evidence Base

The report uses a mixed-methods approach combining desk review, document analysis, media monitoring and qualitative inputs gathered through the project’s consultation process. The desk component covered the Albanian legal framework on corruption, higher education, whistleblowing, procurement and public accountability; university statutes, ethics codes and publicly available regulations, as well as prepare project documentation. 

Website and document review were used to identify what public universities publish about their ethics structures, complaint procedures, codes of conduct and governance rules. This dimension of the research is important because public availability is itself part of institutional integrity. A mechanism that exists only inside a statute or internal regulation but is not visible to students or junior staff is less likely to function as an effective safeguard.

Media monitoring was treated as a diagnostic tool rather than a substitute for adjudication. Publicly reported cases involving Albanian public universities were reviewed to identify recurring risk patterns, especially exam-related bribery allegations, procurement irregularities and failures of internal follow-up. Where ongoing investigations or allegations are mentioned, they are used in this report only as indicators of institutional vulnerability and not as final judicial findings.

The qualitative component relies on the materials that can be clearly documented for this revised draft. These include one interview with a lecturer from Fan S. Noli University in Korça, the Korça consultation held on April 2025 with 15 lecturers and the Shkodra consultation held on May 2025 with 48 participants including university leadership representatives, lecturers, students and academic staff. Together, these materials make it possible to compare a case where some mechanisms are reported as functioning with a setting where reporting barriers and passive corruption were major concerns.

The report does not draw on direct interview evidence from Ministry officials. References to policy-level responsibilities and institutional reform therefore rely on the legal framework, official mandates, and the wider governance context.

For analytical clarity, mechanisms were grouped into three functions: prevention, reporting and response. Prevention includes ethics rules, exam safeguards, transparency tools, recruitment standards, procurement rules and training. Reporting includes complaint routes, whistleblower procedures, anonymous or confidential channels and student feedback tools. Response includes ethics committees, disciplinary procedures, audit follow-up, referrals to law-enforcement bodies and publication of outcomes. This three-part framework also helps distinguish between active corruption, where a direct exchange of illicit benefit is involved, and passive corruption, where unfairness is sustained through favoritism, tolerance, opacity or institutional silence.

Table 1. Mapping framework: prevention, reporting and response

Function	Mechanisms observed in public universities	Main implementation problems
Prevention	Ethics codes; statutes and internal rules; written examination procedures; internal audit; procurement rules; publication of regulations; digital tools in some cases, including automated grading.	Rules are often poorly communicated; training is limited; ethics culture remains weak; digital safeguards are uneven between institutions.
Reporting	Complaints through department heads, deans or rectorates; ethics committees; whistleblower regulations; email and survey tools in some institutions; student councils and informal petitions.	Confidentiality is unclear; many universities lack visible focal points; students are uncertain about protection; fear and low trust reduce reporting.
Response	Ethics committees; disciplinary measures; internal review teams; audit findings; referrals to prosecutors or other external bodies.	Committees are often reactive; outcomes are rarely public; enforcement can be selective or slow; action often becomes visible only after media or external intervention.

3. Regulatory and Institutional Framework

Albania has built a relatively broad anti-corruption framework that is directly relevant to public universities. At the most general level, corruption is addressed through criminal-law provisions and rules governing the conduct of public officials. In higher education, this matters because academic staff and university managers in public institutions exercise public functions in grading, recruitment, procurement, admissions and budget administration. The legal framework is therefore not limited to criminal sanctions; it also includes administrative duties, conflict-of-interest rules, audit requirements and institutional responsibilities for transparent governance.

The sector-specific basis is the legal and regulatory framework governing higher education. Public universities are expected to adopt statutes, internal regulations, ethics rules and governance bodies that support accountability. In practical terms, this means that universities should be able to show not only that they have a code of ethics, but also that they have a procedure for receiving complaints, a body able to review alleged misconduct, and a chain of responsibility for acting on findings.

Whistleblower regulation adds another layer. Public institutions are required to put in place procedures for receiving and handling reports of wrongdoing. Yet the existence of this framework does not automatically answer the question most relevant to university life: does an ordinary student or lecturer know where to go, what protection exists, how confidentiality is handled, and whether any outcome is likely to follow? In many institutions, that practical question remains unanswered.

Procurement and financial oversight are equally important to the integrity of public universities. The risk profile of the sector does not stop at bribery for grades or academic favoritism. Public universities also manage state resources, contract services, purchase goods and administer infrastructure budgets. This means that anti-corruption safeguards have to cover both academic decisions and financial management. Publicly reported cases in Albania confirm that the two are connected: universities can be vulnerable both in their teaching function and in their use of public funds.

EU-related reporting and CSO analysis place these issues in a wider governance context. Integrity in higher education is not a marginal administrative matter. It affects public trust, meritocracy, quality assurance, and Albania’s wider rule-of-law and European integration agenda. For this reason, universities should not be viewed as isolated islands of academic autonomy; they are public institutions whose integrity standards shape broader perceptions of state fairness and institutional credibility.

4. Existing Integrity Mechanisms in Public Universities

4.1 Ethics codes, committees and internal rules

Most Albanian public universities formally operate through statutes, internal regulations and ethics codes. In principle, these instruments define acceptable academic and administrative conduct, prohibit abuse of office and provide a basis for disciplinary action. The documents reviewed for this report show that such mechanisms are common on paper, but their practical weight varies considerably. What universities tend to publish more consistently are general statutes and ethics texts; what is less visible online is how complaints are processed, how often ethics bodies meet, and what kinds of outcomes they produce.

Ethics committees are central to this architecture, yet their role is often ambiguous. They are expected to oversee integrity concerns, but in practice they can become either underused or highly dependent on leadership will. When committees do not issue regular summaries, do not communicate procedural timelines or do not visibly act on sensitive cases, the wider university community has little reason to trust them as effective bodies.

4.2 Reporting channels and whistleblowing

Reporting routes in public universities are often built around hierarchy. A student who wants to complain may be expected to speak first to a department head, dean or rectorate office. That structure may be administratively straightforward, but it can also deter complaints when the complainant seeks distance, confidentiality or protection from academic retaliation. Some universities appear to have additional email or written complaint options, and general whistleblower rules exist at the institutional level. Still, the evidence reviewed here suggests that the existence of a rule does not necessarily translate into a route that students or junior staff consider safe.

The strongest weakness is not always legal absence but procedural uncertainty. In many cases, potential complainants do not know who is responsible for receiving the complaint, whether anonymous reporting is accepted, which body investigates the issue, or whether a complaint about academic ethics is treated differently from a complaint about suspected criminal conduct.

4.3 Transparency, digital tools and public information

Transparency in public universities depends partly on what institutions publish and partly on how their processes are designed. Website review and project materials suggest that public universities differ significantly in how clearly they present governance rules, ethics documents and complaint procedures. A recurring pattern is the publication of formal documents without a simple practical guide to their use.

Digital tools can help close this gap when they reduce discretion and create an audit trail. Automated grading, electronic exam administration, searchable online rules, and digital complaint submission are all examples of prevention-oriented design. Yet these tools are not evenly available. In some institutions, digitalization is beginning to strengthen transparency; in others, it remains too limited to change everyday practice.

4.4 Student participation and the coalition-building dimension

The effectiveness of integrity mechanisms in public universities depends not only on their formal existence, but also on the degree to which they are recognized, understood, and used by the university community. Procedures for complaints, ethics review, or institutional oversight are less likely to function credibly when students and staff remain distant from them or perceive them as inaccessible. For this reason, participation is an important component of institutional integrity.

The consultations in Korça and Shkodra indicate that multi-actor discussion can clarify the gap between formal arrangements and actual practice. Such exchanges make it easier to identify which mechanisms exist only on paper, which operate unevenly, and which are constrained by fear of consequences, lack of information, or low confidence in follow-up. They also show that concerns related to favoritism, opaque decision-making, and weak reporting cultures are more readily articulated in settings where responsibility is shared rather than individualized.

From this perspective, coalition-building can be understood as a supporting condition for integrity reform within public universities. Cooperation among students, lecturers, university bodies, and civil society actors may improve the visibility of existing procedures, reduce uncertainty about reporting options, and strengthen institutional follow-up. While participatory engagement cannot substitute for formal rules or enforcement capacity, it can improve the practical usability of integrity mechanisms and contribute to a more credible accountability environment.

5. Findings from Korça and Shkodra

5.1 Korça: an example of partial operationalisation

The Korça evidence is the clearest example in the project documentation of a public university attempting to move beyond symbolic compliance. In the conducted interview from Fan S. Noli University, institutional concern intensified after student complaints and public controversy, particularly around the Nursing Department. That context is important because it shows that university reform did not begin in the abstract; it was triggered by an episode that exposed institutional vulnerability and forced a more concrete response.

One of the crucial measures from the Korça interview was the use of an automated grading tool intended to reduce direct human interference in exam correction. This mechanism was complemented by a separate office responsible for supervising the examination process. Even if these arrangements do not eliminate every possible abuse, they are significant because they shift the integrity strategy from purely reactive complaint-handling to ex ante prevention. A system is less vulnerable when opportunities for discretionary manipulation are narrowed before a complaint becomes necessary.

Korça also appears to have introduced more direct reporting and feedback channels for students. The interview describes periodic rectorate emails through which students can evaluate courses and raise concerns anonymously, as well as a dedicated route for reporting abuse, including corruption. Complaints are reportedly reviewed by a small team within the rectorate. In addition, a multi-member ethics commission is said to oversee compliance with the university’s ethics code, which is publicly available and forms part of the expected professional conduct of staff.

These elements matter because they show what a functioning minimum architecture might look like: reduced discretion in grading, a visible student feedback route, an internal review mechanism and an ethics body. At the same time, the Korça evidence does not suggest that the university has solved the reporting problem. The interview states that the university does not have a dedicated anti-corruption coordinator and that many students still hesitate to report suspected wrongdoing. Fear, skepticism and low institutional trust continue to limit the use of formal mechanisms, even where those mechanisms exist.

The Korça consultation with 15 lecturers reinforces this picture. Participants reportedly discussed faculty-level integrity procedures, barriers to enforcing codes of conduct, ethical dilemmas encountered in practice and the role of leadership in sustaining or weakening accountability. The key lesson is that technical safeguards are useful, but they remain dependent on visible leadership commitment and a willingness to act when rules are tested.

5.2 Shkodra: collective evidence of reporting barriers and passive corruption

The Shkodra evidence comes from a larger consultation at Luigj Gurakuqi University rather than from a single interview transcript. This is analytically useful because it captures integrity concerns as a collective governance problem. The documented consultation on May 2025 brought together 48 participants, including university leadership representatives, lecturers, students and academic staff. The range of participants itself is significant: it made it possible to compare student experience, staff perceptions and institutional responses within the same discussion space.

Four themes stand out from the Shkodra material. First, participants highlighted the lack of clear and widely understood procedures for reporting misconduct, both for students and for academic staff. A complaint may be theoretically possible, but if people do not know where to begin, whom to trust or what confidentiality exists, the reporting system remains weak in practice. Second, the consultation pointed to ambiguity in codes of conduct and ethics rules, with uneven interpretation between faculties and institutions.

Third, the Shkodra consultation underscored the limited practical protection available to whistleblowers. This concern is especially relevant for students and junior staff, whose institutional position is more vulnerable and who may depend directly on those they might need to report. Fourth, the discussion emphasised passive corruption: favoritism, grade-related informal expectations, opacity in internal decision-making and cultural norms that inhibit complaint. These practices are harder to document than direct bribery, but they can be equally corrosive because they normalize unfairness while leaving few formal traces.

Shkodra therefore highlights a somewhat different problem from the one documented in Korça. Korça shows a university where some mechanisms have been put into operation but are still used with caution. Shkodra, by contrast, reveals a context in which the university community is still struggling to convert general rules into accessible and trusted procedures. The importance of the Shkodra discussion lies not only in what it said about specific mechanisms, but also in what it revealed about institutional culture: low confidence, fragmented knowledge of procedure, and a strong perception that passive corruption survives because it is rarely confronted openly.

The Shkodra consultation also supports one broader conclusion: mixed participation improves the quality of integrity discussions. Where students, lecturers and leadership representatives are present together, it becomes harder to hide behind formalism. Differences in perception become visible, and the conversation can move from general moral concern to more concrete institutional priorities.

6. Systemic Gaps: Why Formal Rules Do Not Produce Sufficient Trust

When the Korça and Shkodra materials are read together with prior analysis points made earlier, a clear pattern emerges: Albanian public universities tend to possess formal integrity instruments, but these instruments do not yet command enough confidence to change reporting behaviour at scale. The central problem is not simply legal absence; it is the distance between formal compliance and credible institutional use.

Several recurring gaps explain this result. The first is weak procedural clarity. Universities may adopt a whistleblowing regulation, an ethics code or a disciplinary rule, yet fail to present a simple practical pathway showing where a complaint begins, what body receives it, what timeline applies and how confidentiality is protected. For students in particular, this opacity can be enough to suppress reporting.

The second gap is the overreliance on hierarchical complaint routes. When complaints must pass through department heads, deans or other internal authorities closely tied to faculty life, the procedure may appear institutionally biased even before any action is taken. This is especially problematic in environments where informal networks, patronage or professional dependence are already perceived as strong.

The third gap concerns visibility of outcomes. A mechanism that never produces a visible result is soon treated as performative. If ethics committees do not communicate annual activity, if disciplinary action is never publicly summarised, and if complainants hear little about follow-up, the wider university community will assume that rules are decorative rather than operative.

A fourth weakness is the absence or low visibility of dedicated integrity personnel. The Korça interview explicitly notes that there is no specific anti-corruption coordinator. Similar uncertainty appears in other project materials. Committees and regulations can exist without a person or office that students can easily identify. In practice, this makes the system feel ownerless.

A fifth weakness is the thin line between passive corruption and ordinary university routine. Many integrity problems in Albania’s public universities do not begin as criminal events. They begin as tolerated favoritism, informal expectations, low-level coercion, opaque decisions, or the assumption that complaints are pointless. These patterns are difficult to punish through criminal law alone. They require preventive and cultural measures inside the university itself.

Finally, the system still depends too heavily on external exposure. The Korça case was reportedly shaped by student protest and public attention. Publicly reported cases in Elbasan and at the Agricultural University of Tirana became visible through prosecutors, auditors or media scrutiny. This sequence suggests that internal mechanisms are not yet strong enough to command confidence before an issue escalates into a public scandal.

7. Media Monitoring and Public Case Patterns

Media monitoring is an important part of any realistic assessment of integrity in higher education. Public universities are shaped not only by the rules they formally adopt, but also by the patterns of risk that become visible when alleged misconduct enters the public domain. For that reason, media reporting, audit findings, and publicly available prosecutorial information provide a useful additional layer of evidence for understanding how corruption risks emerge and how institutions respond.

The material reviewed points to two broad clusters of vulnerability. The first concerns academic authority and evaluation, including allegations related to grading, favoritism, and the misuse of discretionary power within teaching and assessment processes. The second concerns procurement and financial administration, where publicly reported investigations have drawn attention to irregularities in the management of public funds, tendering procedures, and institutional oversight. Taken together, these patterns show that corruption risks in higher education are not confined to classroom interactions, but extend to the broader administrative and financial life of the university.

These patterns are analytically significant for two reasons. First, they widen the scope of integrity assessment beyond student–lecturer relations and demonstrate that effective safeguards must also cover procurement, budget implementation, and internal management practices. Second, they suggest that serious integrity concerns often become visible only after external scrutiny. In many cases, media reporting, audits, and prosecutorial action appear to function as stronger triggers of exposure than ordinary internal complaint or review mechanisms.

Such material must be handled with caution. Allegations, investigations, and public statements are not equivalent to final judicial findings. Even so, they remain relevant for institutional analysis because they reveal recurring areas of vulnerability that universities should be expected to anticipate and address. A mapping of integrity mechanisms would be incomplete if it ignored repeated public signals of risk simply because a case had not yet produced a final legal outcome.

Used carefully, media monitoring does not serve to amplify scandal for its own sake. Its analytical value lies in showing where formal safeguards appear weak, where internal control systems fail to detect or contain problems early, and where institutional responses remain reactive rather than preventive.

8. Regional Best Practices and Their Relevance for Albania

Regional experience suggests that Albania does not need to invent a new integrity vocabulary; it needs to adapt and institutionalise practices that are already working elsewhere. The supporting materials reviewed for this report point to five clusters of best practice that speak directly to the weaknesses identified in Korça, Shkodra and the national desk review.

The first is the operational use of ethical guidelines. Across the region, codes of ethics become more effective when they are linked to real procedures, regular review and visible enforcement. The basic lesson for Albania would therefore be: ethics codes should not function as symbolic compliance documents. They should be tied to investigation rules, conflict-of-interest standards, annual reporting and training.

The second is capacity-building. Regional examples show that seminars, workshops and structured training can strengthen integrity culture when they are treated as a routine institutional responsibility rather than as one-off donor events. This is highly relevant in Albania, where the evidence reviewed for this report repeatedly points to low awareness of complaint routes, inconsistent understanding of ethics rules and weak confidence in procedural protections.

The third is multi-stakeholder collaboration. Several regional initiatives bring together universities, civil society actors and public institutions to address corruption in higher education through joint action rather than isolated institutional responses. The Korça and Shkodra consultations showed that integrity is more likely to become actionable when students, lecturers, management and external actors can discuss concrete problems together.

The fourth is digital prevention. The Korça evidence already points in this direction through the reported use of automated grading. Regional practice suggests that the same logic can be extended further: anonymous digital reporting, searchable repositories of ethics rules, online publication of committee decisions in anonymised form, and standard electronic record-keeping for assessment and procurement all help reduce discretionary space.

The fifth is structured transparency benchmarking. Tools such as integrity baselines, accountability scorecards and public disclosure templates allow institutions to compare performance, identify weak areas and make reform visible. Albania would benefit from a simple national template requiring every public university to publish the same minimum integrity information each year. That would make comparison easier and reduce the current patchwork of visibility.

The broad lesson from these practices is not technological or legal alone. Integrity improves when universities combine clear rules, usable procedures and participatory ownership. Any one of these elements without the others tends to produce limited results.

9. Recommendations

9.1 For Government and the Ministry of Education

• Issue a sector-wide model for complaint handling in public universities. This should include minimum requirements on entry points, confidentiality, timelines, record-keeping, appeal paths and coordination between ethics bodies and administrative structures.

• Clarify how students are protected when they report corruption or serious ethics breaches. The current system remains too ambiguous from the student perspective.

• Require annual integrity disclosures from public universities. At minimum, these should cover responsible bodies, number and type of complaints received, broad outcomes, training delivered and unresolved structural problems.

• Link integrity more explicitly to quality assurance, accreditation and public evaluation. It should not be enough for a university to show that a code exists; it should also have to show that the code is used, communicated and reviewed.

• Support standardised training on ethics, conflict of interest, whistleblowing and complaint handling, ideally in cooperation with ASPA and relevant public institutions.

9.2 For Public Universities

• Appoint clearly visible integrity focal points or offices that students and staff can identify easily. Committees and regulations are not enough when no one owns the process in practical terms.

• Reduce overdependence on hierarchical complaint routes. Students should not be limited to reporting through department heads or deans when they fear bias or retaliation.

• Strengthen ethics committees by clarifying their mandate, ensuring regular activity and publishing annual anonymised summaries of their work.

• Publish simple procedural maps on university and faculty websites showing where to report a concern, what happens next, which body is responsible and how confidentiality is handled.

• Expand prevention-oriented digital tools, including secure online complaint submission, digital archiving of assessment records and, where feasible, automated or double-blind grading measures.

• Integrate ethics and academic-integrity information into student orientation, staff induction and periodic communication from rectorates and faculties.

• Increase transparency in procurement and internal audit follow-up, since university integrity problems are not limited to the academic process.

9.3 For Students, CSOs and Local Integrity Coalitions

• Institutionalise periodic integrity forums (such as those that happened in Korça and Shkodra) nation- and regionwide that bring together students, lecturers, management and external observers. These forums should be used to review recurring problems and monitor follow-up.

• Improve reporting literacy. Students need practical guidance on what counts as corruption, what can be addressed through ethics procedures, what requires criminal reporting and what evidence can be documented safely.

• Use civil society organisations as trust bridges rather than only as external critics. CSOs can help explain procedures, support complainants and maintain public attention on implementation gaps.

• Pair evidence with awareness. Media work and public discussion should remain linked to concrete institutional recommendations so that integrity is framed as a reform agenda, not only as scandal.

9.4 Cross-cutting priority

• Move from symbolic compliance to demonstrable use. The most important reform is not a new document but a new standard of credibility: visible procedures, understandable entry points, routine communication and consistent follow-up.

10. Conclusion

Albanian public universities are not operating without rules. They already function within a dense legal and regulatory framework, and some institutions have started to operationalise integrity through concrete preventive and reporting mechanisms. The real problem is that these efforts remain uneven, partially trusted and weakly standardised across the sector.

The revised evidence base used in this report leads to a straightforward conclusion. What Albania’s public universities lack most is not another layer of formal commitment, but a more credible bridge between rule and practice. Students and staff need complaint routes they can understand, protections they can trust and outcomes they can see. Universities need ethics bodies that do more than exist on paper, and central authorities need to treat integrity as part of quality, fairness and democratic legitimacy in higher education.

The project’s work in Korça and Shkodra suggests that reform is most realistic when it combines evidence, dialogue and public visibility. Integrity improves when universities are willing to test how their rules function in everyday life, and when the wider university community is given safe and practical ways to insist that those rules matter.

This report was created as part of the project “Upholding Integrity: Coalition Building for Fighting Corruption in Higher Education,” organized by the Albanian Institute for International Studies (AIIS) within the framework of the SELDI Small Grants Programme “Financial Support for Grassroots and Youth CSOs with Outreach to Citizens,” funded by the European Union. All content is the sole responsibility of AIIS and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union or SELDI.