By Sandro Tabatadze
Georgia’s government has announced a sweeping reform of higher education that pulls more decisions under central control, trims academic diversity, and limits international engagement. This is not an administrative adjustment—it’s a decisive move to bring one of the country’s last relatively plural arenas entirely under political authority. Sandro Tabatadze explains what is at stake.
For a decade, Georgia’s institutions have been bent toward executive dominance. Courts, media, and civil society were disciplined first. Higher education, messy, plural, and internationally connected, held out longest. The newly announced reform changes that. By bringing universities to heel, the government closes the last institutional space capable of producing organized dissent and independent expertise.
What the Reform Does
The official concept promises efficiency, quality, and regional development. Behind the slogans are hard instruments of control: abolishing the 12th school grade; collapsing degree cycles from four plus two to three plus one; concentrating duplicate faculties under a “one city – one faculty” rule; restricting foreign-student admissions in public universities; and shifting to state-set priorities and admissions quotas. Taken together, these measures standardize knowledge, shrink academic labor, and recentralize power in the ministry.
These shifts also collide with European norms and cooperative frameworks: the Bologna Process, European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA), World Federation for Medical Education (WFME), and Erasmus+.
Centralization is the method; conformity is the goal. Georgia’s higher education overhaul standardizes programs, compresses degree cycles, and recentralizes academic planning—not to solve a pedagogical problem, but to consolidate political control over a sector that was already influenced from the top, yet still preserved a degree of professional autonomy in its everyday academic life.
The Government’s Case
Leaders frame the reform as national pragmatism. The state, they argue, should fund only what the “market needs,” steer students to the regions, and stop the outflow of youth. In this telling, shorter degrees “save resources,” and limiting foreigners in public universities protects capacity for Georgian students. Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze had already signaled it in 2024, when he claimed that many professors at Tbilisi State University were politically biased and professionally unqualified —portraying universities as enclaves of resistance rather than spaces of expertise. Later that same year, inNovember 2024, he denounced the “pseudo-liberal roots” of the education system and vowed to “cut them out completely”.
Official justifications pivot between national spirit and economic efficiency: keep young people at home, align degrees with “the market,” and curb so-called foreign influence. But the operational logic is unmistakable—strip universities of autonomy, narrow international links, and subordinate knowledge production to political authority.
Authoritarian Sequencing
Seen in sequence, this move is unsurprising. After the Foreign Agents Law and the disputed 2024 parliamentary election, universities became one of the main hubs of youth protest. Professors organized petitions; students marched from campuses; ministers needed security to teach. Kobakhidze accused two private universities, the Free University and the University of Georgia, of acting as “extremist” training grounds for young activists allegedly guided by Western NGOs. The government’s response to this perceived threat has not been dialogue but institutional redesign to preempt resistance.
Universities are not just classrooms; they are logistical bases for collective action. Once courts, the civil service, and NGOs are subdued, higher education becomes the remaining hinge between citizens and organized dissent. Capturing it completes the architecture of backsliding.
Collision With Europe
Within the context of Georgia’s democratic erosion, rising Euroskepticism, and the government’s decision to freeze EU integration, the reform carries particular symbolic weight. Higher education is also the most Europeanized policy arena in Georgia. Since 2005, joint and double degrees, staff exchanges, and quality assurance have been woven into daily practice. Cutting master’s study to one year and restricting international intakes would make mobility—including Erasmus+—impracticable and jeopardize recognition through ENQA and WFME networks.
A one‑year master’s and constrained intakes are not minor tweaks. They foreclose Erasmus‑style mobility, disrupt joint degrees, and risk isolating public universities from European quality‑assurance ecosystems that make Georgian diplomas portable and Georgian academia outward-looking.
The Political Economy
The reform carries fiscal temptations. The state signals lavish salaries for a narrow cadre of full professors while planning to consolidate departments, rerun hiring under new rules, and build a new campus near Rustavi—financed in part by selling valuable university real estate in central Tbilisi. The one‑off windfall comes with long‑term dependency.
Behind the talk of excellence is a familiar political economy: shrink the professoriate, bid up a loyal core, centralize hiring, and monetize prime real estate. The budget gains are immediate; the academic and civic costs will be generational.
What to Watch Next
Three indicators will reveal whether this is reform or capture: first, the criteria for new academic competitions; second, ministerial decrees on faculty redistribution and admissions quotas; third, quality‑assurance decisions that determine Erasmus+ mobility and degree recognition. On each, transparency—not slogans—will tell the story.
In a political climate where the right to protest is curtailed and opposition figures face imprisonment, the autonomy of universities takes on even greater importance. Georgia’s higher education overhaul should be read plainly: it is a state project to subordinate universities to executive will. In a country where education remained the last domain of institutional pluralism, this is the capstone of an authoritarian turn—and a test the European community cannot ignore.
Sandro Tabatadze is a political scientist, assistant professor at Tbilisi State University and postdoc researcher at Comenius University Bratislava. His work focuses on party politics, education policy, and democratic backsliding in Georgia and wider Europe.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
