Junior Eurovision has given me and my ten year-old an excuse to visit Tbilisi in Georgia this year – and he’s been thrilled to learn that it just so happens to have been a dramatic week in higher education policy news.
If you click around on the ruling party’s Facebook page, you’ll find the face of Bidzina Ivanishvili, the party’s billionaire founder and honorary chairman, proudly proclaiming one of the headlines from his party’s reforms:
Georgian Dream – the first government in Georgia’s history to make higher education free!
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There’s a lot more to it than that. The government has pushed through sweeping reforms to the Law on Higher Education that include an outright ban on state universities recruiting international students – all with what critics argue has been extraordinary speed and minimal consultation.
Free education
The current system, which has operated since the mid-2000s, allows students to take state grants based on their national exam performance to any accredited university – public or private.
In 2025, 7,320 students received grants totalling 11 million lari (about £3m), with 66 per cent going to public universities and 34 per cent to private institutions, like the University of Buckingham accredited “British University Georgia”.
Under the new model, the entire grant architecture will be abolished. State universities will instead receive direct government funding to provide “free” education to all admitted students at both bachelor’s and master’s levels, whilst private universities will lose all access to state support.
The government presents it all as democratising access, but critics note that with strict quotas, “free” education may actually mean fewer available places overall. That’s a story that sounds familiar.
The reforms go far beyond funding though. A “one city, one faculty” model means that within any given city, only one state university will be allowed to offer each academic discipline. In Tbilisi, for instance, where law faculties currently exist at Tbilisi State University, Ilia State University, and Georgian Technical University, these would be consolidated into a single faculty at one institution.
The government will determine which programs each university will be allowed to offer, and set strict enrollment quotas based on labour market research conducted with the Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development. That’s another story that sounds familiar, albeit ministers and regulators in England have been more prone to nudges and kite-flying than pulling levers.
The academic structure itself is being compressed from the current 4+2 model (four-year bachelor’s, two-year master’s) to a 3+1+1 system, with three years for bachelor’s degrees in non-regulated professions, followed by one year for a master’s degree, with an optional additional year for those planning to pursue doctoral studies.
While authorities claim this aligns Georgia with the Bologna Process – the European higher education standardisation framework – critics argue the opposite, fearing these changes will make Georgian qualifications less compatible with international systems and compromise students’ ability to pursue studies abroad. The UK seems to get away with it – and it’s part of a broader trend across Europe for governments aiming to speed up students’ entry to the Labour market.
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Serve our citizens first
The ban on international students at state universities has generated particular confusion and concern among academic observers. Under the new legislative package, Georgia’s 19 state universities will be barred from admitting international students from next academic year, with only minimal exceptions.
That’s an extraordinary reversal for institutions that have spent years building international partnerships, recruiting foreign students as both a source of revenue and academic diversity, and positioning themselves as regional education hubs. Tbilisi State University alone hosts hundreds of international students, particularly in English-language medical programmes that have attracted students from India, Nigeria, and the Middle East.
Deputy Minister Zviad Gabisonia has defended the measure as a way to ensure state universities focus their resources on Georgian students, with the government arguing that making education “completely free” for domestic students requires concentrating limited state resources.
From Georgian Dream’s perspective, the 19 state universities should serve Georgian citizens first, whilst private institutions remain free to recruit internationally. The government also says that it’s part of their labour market-focused approach – training Georgian students for Georgia’s economy rather than providing education for students who may leave after graduation.
They’ve positioned it all alongside the broader promise of free education as evidence of prioritising ordinary Georgians over international interests – a message that resonates with some domestic audiences who’ve seen international students, particularly in medical programmes, as taking places from local applicants.
Critics argue the international student ban exposes fundamental contradictions in the government’s rhetoric about “quality improvement” and alignment with European standards, and will create a two-tier system – isolated, government-controlled state universities for most Georgians, and expensive, internationally-connected private institutions for the wealthy.
For them, the government’s claim that it will “raise quality” by ensuring only “highly qualified students with high scores are admitted” conflate exclusivity with excellence, and they warn that isolation from international academic networks may accelerate brain drain as ambitious Georgian students increasingly see their country’s higher education system as deliberately provincial.
Liberal fascism
There’s plenty of populism in here, of course. The PM’s framing for the package is that the current education system (which he blames on previous governments and Western influence) has left Georgians vulnerable to what he calls “contemporary liberal fascism” – his term for Western liberal values and influences:
An insufficiently educated public is easily subjected to manipulation, external interference; it is easy to sow hate in such a society; it is easy to spread ideologies such as were once Bolshevism, fascism, and such is today’s contemporary liberal fascism.
Meanwhile “deconcentration” in the reforms refers to the government’s plan for geographic redistribution of higher education away from Tbilisi, where 85 per cent of all university students are currently concentrated. The aim is to create a new university hub in Kutaisi in western Georgia, and along with the “one city, one faculty” model they argue it will help develop regions outside the capital and ensure more balanced development across the country.
Critics counter that geographic deconcentration, combined with the concentration of academic disciplines into single institutions, may introduce infrastructure challenges and could be used to justify selling off university buildings in Tbilisi.
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The political and academic reaction has been swift and largely negative, but has all been lost a bit inside wider anti-government protests and increasing authoritarianism. Critics argue that the reforms serve multiple authoritarian purposes – centralising government control over HE, enabling purges of non-aligned academics, reducing the autonomy of institutions, and potentially decreasing overall access to higher education despite the “free” education rhetoric.
The fear of repression is palpable – academics figure that the restructuring will be used to remove academics and professional services staff who don’t align with Georgian Dream’s increasingly anti-Western stance.
The reforms have been pushed through parliament in the same week that legislators adopted new restrictions on protests, extending police powers to clear not just roadways but also pedestrian areas – a direct response to daily demonstrations that have continued outside parliament since Georgian Dream’s announcement at the end of November that Georgia would suspend its EU integration process until 2028.
For the kids coming to watch JESC, there’s been a parallel bunch of reforms to schools too. Primary schools will see mandatory uniforms for grades 1-6, mobile phone bans during classes, and state-approved single textbooks for all subjects – again, critics see a systematic effort to establish state control over all levels of education, while the government argues that a 2004 document on national education goals, adopted by the formerly ruling United National Movement (UNM), was “saturated with liberal values”, and stressed that the new version approved in 2024 is based on a “patriotic spirit”.
Capture, don’t destroy
Allegations about universities fuse some of the conspiracy theories we’ve seen in the UK with some of Trump’s wilder allegations. In September pro-government TV channel Imedi reported that Georgia’s State Security Service is investigating “money laundering” linked to anti-government protests, claiming that foreign intelligence services are spending millions to orchestrate regime change through youth movements.
Georgian Dream has some form on alleging foreign-orchestrated revolutionary plots – this report accused several Georgian universities, particularly the University of Georgia, Ilia State University, and Free University, of being hubs for protest training, claiming that up to 600 students “trained by foreign intelligence services” were being paid 200-300 GEL daily to protest, with funding allegedly channeled through university-linked companies and NGOs.
More broadly, there’s a pattern to all of this both in Europe and across the West – populist governments believe that universities are too valuable to close, but too influential to leave autonomous. From Hungary’s restructuring of university governance to Poland’s attempts to control academic appointments to Turkey’s post-coup purges, the pattern is capture, don’t destroy.
These governments understand universities as sites of ideological formation that shape future elites and national narratives. Rather than rejecting higher education, they’re trying to repurpose it – maintaining prestigious institutions and even improving facilities while systematically removing international connections, critical perspectives, and institutional autonomy.
It often succeeds initially – because it’s wrapped in appealing promises of accessibility and national service. Who argues against “free” education or “raising standards”? But for people like Maia Chankseliani, Professor of Comparative and International Education at Oxford, they risk undoing much of the progress made by Georgian higher education over the past two decades:
Georgia needs a university system that is open, autonomous, and globally connected, rather than one bound by rigid rules and centralised visions of conformity. Georgia’s students and academics deserve a system that is free to think and innovate.
The thing though that’s most interesting about the debate is the extent to which those opposed seek to engage with the arguments on their own terms – will this really improve quality, will this actually improve outcomes, and so on – and those who argue that something more fundamental is being done to universities that renders constructive engagement on the detail hollow and counterproductive. That’s also a debate that’s been raging across US HE – and it’s very much coming to the UK.
