The Georgian Dream government’s proposed higher education “reform” did not emerge in a policy vacuum. It is not a neutral policy initiative. It is a political act.
Introduced in October 2025 and adopted in December 2025 without substantial participation of Georgia’s academic community, the reform must be understood in the context of the country’s democratic backsliding. It is a strategic intervention – to erase one of the last remaining institutional spaces capable of sustaining independent thought.
Rusudan Chanturia is an education policy specialist with over 20 years of experience in higher education reform and international cooperation. She is currently a volunteer member of the Education Under Threat movement.
The higher education reform, set to be implemented in the coming months, promises radical measures.
The reform envisions geographic “deconcentration,” including a one city–one faculty principle, under which each faculty would be offered in only one public university per city. It would also scrap the effective voucher-based scholarship model, where individual students compete for state grants and take them to universities of their choice. Instead, public universities would receive direct state funding, with authorities promising tuition-free higher education for enrolled students.
The reform would also replace the current 4+2 Bachelor’s and Master’s model with a 3+1+1 system, under which most Bachelor’s programs would last three years, followed by one-year Master’s programs. It further envisages centralized staffing rules and state-determined enrollment quotas aligned with labor market demands, while largely barring foreign students from studying in state universities.
The ruling party argues the reform will improve education quality, make universities more affordable, and better align graduates’ skills with labor market needs. Yet the reform fully fits into the global playbook of what political scientist Johannes Gerschewski has described as “autocratic survival.”
In contemporary contexts of democratic decline, universities are rarely abolished: they are methodically restructured.
In contemporary contexts of democratic decline, universities are rarely abolished: they are methodically restructured. Governments tighten control over governance, appointments, funding, curricula, and accreditation, all while preserving the language of efficiency, modernization, and quality assurance. This approach allows regimes to erode academic autonomy while avoiding the political costs of overt repression. Georgia now appears to be reproducing this familiar pattern.
Research shows that contemporary authoritarianism advances primarily through the legal and administrative capture of independent institutions rather than through open coercion. Universities are especially vulnerable due to their symbolic authority and institutional dependence on the state. Once leadership is politically subordinated, evaluation centralized, and dissent reframed as disloyalty or “foreign influence,” universities may continue to function formally while losing their capacity to generate independent knowledge and engage in free inquiry.
Georgia’s trajectory mirrors these patterns. Universities remain among the few institutions not yet fully subordinated. They continue to host debate, produce independent research, and educate students capable of challenging dominant narratives. It is precisely this autonomy, and its potential to sustain democratic agency, that places higher education at the center of the state’s current campaign of control.
A closer look at the reform shows how its concrete steps could tighten political control while isolating Georgian academia from the global higher education landscape.
- Deconcentration or Social Exclusion?
Presented as a remedy for over-centralization, the proposed geographic “deconcentration” would, in practice, restrict access to higher education for large segments of the student population.
Currently, roughly 84 percent of students are enrolled in Tbilisi. Reducing this share to 60 percent would require displacing tens of thousands of learners. Recent analysis suggests that nearly 30,000 students would effectively lose the ability to study in the capital. Those most affected would be students for whom relocation is not feasible: young people who must combine study with work, provide family care, manage health conditions, or rely on the capital’s social services and inclusive infrastructure.
The rapid “deconcentration” would hit rural and low-income students hardest. For ethnic minority students and those with disabilities, the impact would be even greater, as many rely on inclusive pathways, language support, and accessible infrastructure concentrated in the capital.
- From Academic Pluralism to Geographic Command-and-Control
The “one city–one faculty” model that comes alongside the deconcentration plan poses a direct threat to institutional autonomy. It removes universities’ ability to define their own academic profiles and set strategic directions.
Presented as an efficiency measure, the model mandates redistributing faculties across state universities based on loosely defined notions of “traditional profiles” or “historical experience.” The policy effectively replaces academic judgment with centralized planning, undermining healthy competition between institutions, fragmenting academic ecosystems, limiting diversity, and curtailing interdisciplinary cooperation and research.
- Centralized Staffing and Erosion of Academic Self-Governance
The reform also introduces staffing rules that would limit each academic unit to a single full professor, supported by a fixed hierarchy of subordinate staff.
This replaces collegial governance with a rigid chain of command, concentrating authority at the top while structurally silencing those below. In doing so, it directly undermines university autonomy and academic freedom, stripping institutions of control over personnel decisions and turning universities from self-governing academic communities into vertically managed bureaucracies.
As Oxford University Professor Maia Chankseliani has observed, the proposal ignores the flexible and diverse staffing arrangements that underpin successful higher education systems. These include joint appointments, part-time roles, and practice-based teaching positions. In well-functioning systems, staffing models evolve from institutional missions and academic needs, not from uniform, state-imposed formulas.
Another instrument of political control would be replacing the scholarship-based funding model with an undefined system of state-determined funding, combined with centrally imposed enrollment quotas tied to labor-market assessments and demands.
This makes universities financially dependent on discretionary state allocations rather than predictable, rule-based funding mechanisms. Such dependence allows funding to be used selectively: to reward compliance, suppress dissent, or marginalize institutions deemed politically inconvenient. The core issue is not tuition policy but governance: who controls funding decisions, according to which criteria, and under what systems of transparency and accountability.
Universities remain among the few institutions not yet fully subordinated. They continue to host debate, produce independent research, and educate students capable of challenging dominant narratives.
This new funding logic reduces higher education to an instrument of short-term labor-market alignment. It contradicts the values of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and the principles of the Magna Charta Universitatum, which affirm institutional autonomy and academic freedom as preconditions for universities to serve the public good.
The EHEA framework recognizes higher education as a plural public institution, advancing knowledge through research, fostering critical and independent thinking, educating responsible citizens, and contributing to democratic, cultural, and social development alongside economic needs. Subordinating academic priorities to state-defined employment metrics substantially narrows this mission. It replaces academic judgment with economic instrumentalism while placing Georgia at odds with the normative foundations of the European higher education community.
- Compressed Degrees, Compromised Quality
The government’s proposal to replace the 4+2-degree structure with a rigid 3+1 model represents a serious breach of academic autonomy. It also marks another clear departure from the principles of the European Higher Education Area. By mandating a uniform program length, the reform strips universities and academic staff of the authority to determine degree duration based on disciplinary requirements and specificities, learning outcomes, and internationally recognized academic standards.
This one-size-fits-all approach ignores disciplinary diversity, weakens curricular depth, and risks producing underprepared graduates, particularly in research-intensive and professionally regulated fields.
Restriction on admitting international students to public universities is another deliberate retreat from the European academic space.
A robust body of international research demonstrates that internationalization is a central driver of higher education quality, research capacity, and institutional sustainability. Comparative studies show that international engagement strengthens academic standards, fosters innovation through diversity, and anchors universities in global peer-review and quality assurance networks. International student mobility and cross-border cooperation also generate significant economic, social, and diplomatic benefits.
As my colleagues in the Education Under Threat movement have stressed, these changes come at a moment when confidence in Georgia’s higher education governance is already fragile. They thus only add to concerns over transparency, comparability, and institutional reliability.
Georgian universities become increasingly unable to function as credible partners in joint degree programs, international research consortia, academic exchanges, and externally funded initiatives, including those for the capacity building of the faculties. International cooperation rests on stable governance, credible peer review, and academic freedom – conditions European and global partners treat as non-negotiable.
Personal Reckoning
In 2004–2007, nearly two decades ago, I worked at the Ministry of Education and Science of Georgia in the European Integration Division. I was among the civil servants involved in Georgia’s entry into the Bologna Process and the European Higher Education Area. Reform then meant moving away from post-Soviet command logic toward autonomy, trust, and international integration.
Watching that trajectory unravel is profoundly unsettling. As a Georgian education specialist with over two decades of experience in education policy and practice, I have seen what happens when reform becomes a punitive measure, a tool of control rather than empowerment.
Universities are not instruments of state planning. They require autonomy and academic freedom to educate critical thinkers and sustain democratic life.
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