Lili Sula raises the alarm over the State Matura: The decline in graduates, emigration abroad, and grade manipulation are deepening the crisis

The conclusion of the State Matura exams has brought serious problems back into focus that, according to assessments, are harming not only education but also the country’s social structure itself. Instead of serving as a mechanism for measuring high school students’ knowledge, this process is increasingly revealing the shrinking number of students and raising concerns about the depopulation of the country by young people.

Official data reflect a troubling picture. While in 2016 there were more than 41,000 graduates, their number has now fallen to around 26,600, which translates into a drop of nearly 38%. Meanwhile, around 4,000 of them are seeking documentation to continue higher education outside Albania.

Lecturer Lili Sula, who also heads the Education Department in the Democratic Party, said in an interview with “Ora News” that this sharp decline will be felt directly in Albanian universities, which, according to her, will face increasingly empty lecture halls, as well as a lack of intellectual capital and workforce in the years ahead.

According to Sula, the departure of young people is not simply an indicator of a crisis in education, but a process she considers a silent denationalization, with consequences for critical thinking and public life in the country. She links this development to a deliberate political approach, accusing the government of trying to distance young people from engagement and reaction to those in power.

In this context, even recent projects to move student campuses outside Tirana are interpreted by her as attempts to keep students away from public attention and active participation.

Another issue that, according to her, remains problematic is the credibility of the exams themselves. Although in some centers, especially in Tirana, checks have been accompanied by psychological pressure on students, the leaking of exam papers in other cities completely undermines the validity of the process. The moment an exam paper is published within the first 20 minutes, it can immediately be distributed across the country and create opportunities for abuse.

The consequences, according to Sula, are also reflected in the results. In recent years, unusual cases have been identified in which hundreds of students with a grade average of 5 during high school were awarded a 10 on the Matura exams.

This large discrepancy, she said, undermines fair competition and harms those graduates who achieved their results on merit, especially in the competition for university admission.

Lili Sula believes that the current State Matura format fails to measure students’ real knowledge. For her, this failure is also confirmed by the PISA 2022 results, where Albania ranked far below European standards.

She stressed that if there is no immediate intervention with a fully digital and transparent testing system, the Matura risks remaining only a propaganda façade covering the real crisis in the country’s education system.

In the interview, Sula said that the publication of exam papers has now become an annual ritual. However, she underlined that the main concern this year is not only this phenomenon, but the sharp decline in the number of graduates from one year to the next.

She said that, compared with last year, there are more than 2,000 fewer graduates this school year. According to her, there are currently 26,600 graduates and 4,000 of them aim to study abroad, a fact which, as she put it, is verified by requests for grade lists and the documentation needed for applications to foreign universities.

Sula described this situation, repeated every year, as dramatic, arguing that it will be reflected in universities, where there will be fewer and fewer first-year students in lecture halls, but also in the labor market, where there will be a shortage of teachers and qualified professionals. According to her, quality also declines when the number of graduates shrinks and when the best choose to leave.

She argued that when there are few graduates competing for universities and when the best among them apply to study abroad, then the quality at Tirana’s universities and at the country’s other higher education institutions inevitably declines.

According to Sula, this is linked to a full-fledged depopulation policy which, in her view, leads toward denationalization. She said that the reduction in the number of graduates will bring population aging, a lack of workforce, a lack of intellectual capacity in the labor market, and a weakening of the articulation of public and political thought.

She went on to point out that although today’s protests are worthy of appreciation, throughout these years there has been a lack of open public thought, alternative views, and critical judgment. According to her, very few voices have analyzed developments in the country with a critical eye.

She said that the departure of young people, whom she considers the future of the nation, is a strategy to divert attention and avoid having an active youth. In this context, she also mentioned the prime minister’s presence in Durrës for the student campus project at “Aleksandër Moisiu” University, linking this to January statements about moving Tirana students toward living in Durrës.

According to her, the prime minister has an interest in keeping young people away from public attention, because students and youth have historically proven to be a reactive force and can pose a threat to prolonged power.

Regarding the management of the State Matura, Sula said that the full statistics must be awaited in order to understand what this process has produced compared with other years. She underlined that it must be seen how real the assessment is and whether the absence of exam paper leaks in some tests has genuinely improved the quality of grading.

According to her, this year the exam paper was somewhat better protected and did not leak as it did in previous years within the first 20 minutes of the exam. Nevertheless, she raised the question of whether this has truly led to quality assessment and whether the grades obtained on the exam match the results from the three years of high school in literature, mathematics, or elective subjects.

She recalled that even before there had been a large gap between the annual grade and the Matura result, citing as an example the case from two years ago, when around 300 graduates had a difference of 5 grade points, from a 5 to a 10.

For Sula, these distortions in the evaluation system affect not only those who copied or benefited from leaked exam papers, but especially all other graduates, whose competitiveness for university enrollment in September is harmed.

Asked whether the Matura measures real knowledge or only the ability to train with test models, Sula stated categorically that it does not. According to her, in theory the State Matura should assess the results accumulated during the three years of high school, but in practice this does not happen.

She referred to the 2022 PISA assessments, saying they highlighted the weakness of Albanian graduates, since the students who finished school last year were those tested in 2022. Meanwhile, according to her, in 2025 another group of 15-year-olds currently in high school was tested.

Sula said it cannot be expected that the Matura will provide a real picture of knowledge when the PISA results themselves have raised the alarm over a sharp decline in performance, to the point that Albania cannot be compared even with countries perceived as backward by Western Europe.

In conclusion, she expressed her conviction that the Matura should be reformed into a digital system with a completely different format, so that it can genuinely measure students’ knowledge. According to her, the process should not be turned into a public spectacle or government propaganda supported by punitive measures and meticulous checks that create pressure on graduates.

She stressed that Tirana graduates in particular face psychological shock because of the strict checks before entering the exam, while in other cities the situation has been more relaxed. According to her, the tests generally did not leak in the capital’s high schools, at least not in the main ones, but in other areas. However, it is enough for one copy of the exam paper to leak for it to become public within a few minutes across all of Albania, for teachers and graduates alike. For this reason, she reiterated that State Matura testing is not a real measure of the knowledge students have gained over the years and does not accurately show what they have learned during high school.