Georgia’s government is selling its planned overhaul of higher education as a bold modernization drive. Natia Pipia, an assistant professor at Tbilisi State University, sees it as a very expensive experiment that could reshape the country’s economy, and its protest scene.
At the heart of the plan is “one city, one faculty” and a wider geographic decentralization of universities. As Pipia told Interpressnews, the idea is technically possible but stresses that it comes with a huge price tag. Moving faculties out of Tbilisi into cities like Kutaisi and Rustavi means not only new buildings, but labs, equipment and modern teaching technology. For a small economy, she argues, this makes the government’s project “the most expensive reform” in the education sector so far.
She also doubts the state can carry it through from start to finish. Georgia’s budget has grown with the economy, but not enough, in her view, to fund a full-scale rebuild of university infrastructure across multiple cities. In the worst case, she warns, Georgia could “stop halfway” in the decentralization push and end up with a fragmented system that is neither fully modernized nor stable.
The reform would also redirect thousands of students away from the capital. If 40 percent of new entrants enroll in Kutaisi or Rustavi instead of Tbilisi, the capital will lose renters, part-time workers and the steady flow of young customers who support cafés and small businesses around campuses. Those same student flows would boost regional cities, but Pipia notes that their housing and services are not yet ready, so there could be a period of real “crisis” in student living conditions while new infrastructure catches up.
She sees political consequences too. If only one university in Tbilisi keeps politically active faculties such as humanities, law and social sciences, especially one perceived as close to the government, street politics in the capital may calm down. If, instead, these faculties cluster inside an opposition-leaning university in another city, that place could turn into a concentrated protest hub, with looser police control than in the capital. Pipia points to Latin America and the 2006 “penguin revolution” in Chile as examples of how student movements can rattle governments.
On degree structure, the government wants a three-year bachelor’s model, followed by one or two years at master’s level. Pipia says many professions can be taught well enough in three years, and that for roughly “99 percent” of students the extra year in the current system has added little beyond cost. But for the remaining one percent who could become top researchers, she argues that cutting depth in fields like history or the natural sciences may weaken the country’s long-term scholarly potential.
The interview paints a picture of widespread staff shortages across disciplines. For Pipia, “qualification” in 2025 is not just mastery of a subject, but the ability to teach with smartboards, virtual simulations, robots and other tools. Many older lecturers still rely only on traditional lectures, and even PowerPoint is not universal. Training existing staff, she says, is the only realistic way out, since Georgia simply does not have enough fully qualified specialists to replace them, especially in technical subjects.
Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze has attacked what he calls inflated course lists and oversized payrolls. Pipia agrees that money is often spent poorly, but thinks his flagship example, the law faculty, is actually the least convincing case. In her own field, Georgian history, she notes that five semesters are already packed and that cutting content would mean choosing between classic authors like Ivane Javakhishvili and newer research. At the same time, she says universities could raise professors’ pay by about 25 percent if they trimmed one extra year of teaching for the majority and cut what she calls an “enormously” overgrown administrative apparatus where, in some cases, 1 000 lecturers are matched by 2 000 administrators.
Another sensitive point is the plan to give universities, not the national Shota Rustaveli science fund, control over research grants. If each field ends up with only one full professor in charge, Pipia warns this would create “the dictatorship of a single scientific view” and stifle debate. It would also leave stand-alone research bodies such as archives, museums and manuscript institutes in limbo, since they currently rely on national-level grants rather than university budgets.
The reform also reaches down into schools. The government wants to move public schools from 12 to 11 years, while telling parents that a twelfth year will still be available in private schools for those who need an extra year to get into foreign universities. Pipia says this effectively restricts abroad-study options to families who can afford high private-school fees, since public-school students will no longer get that extra year for free.
On student numbers, she accepts that the state can set priorities for how many lawyers, engineers or doctors to train, but thinks the deeper problem is poor careers advice. Many teenagers, she says, have no idea that fully funded technical degrees, such as engineering geodesy, almost guarantee a job, while fashionable disciplines churn out jobless graduates.
Foreign students are another pressure point. They pay much higher fees and, in Pipia’s view, effectively “finance” the most qualified teaching staff, who work in English and are active in international conferences. If foreign enrollment is reduced or pushed out of state university facilities without big salary increases for staff, she fears Georgian students could end up taught more often by less qualified lecturers.
Would the reform trigger a new brain drain or lure back Georgian academics from Europe and the United States? Pipia is blunt. She believes that only a slide into open authoritarianism would push intellectuals out on a large scale. As for bringing them home, she insists that better pay and conditions are crucial. In her words, “no one goes anywhere for the idea of the nation’s greatness” any more.
