[Prishtina-E] FYI: NYT article on American University in Kosova

[Valbona Sherifi]

The New York Times
October 10, 2003
A Kosovo University With an American Accent
By NICHOLAS WOOD

PRISTINA, Kosovo, Oct. 9 — When Kathy Schneider tells a joke, it comes
as a surprise to her students. Humor is one of the last thing students
expect here in Kosovo when they enter a classroom.

That, however, is something Ms. Schneider and her colleagues at the
newly opened American University in Kosovo hope to change as they seek
to fill a gap left by a state education system still influenced by
Yugoslav-style Communism.

"I want to see the light bulbs come on," said Ms. Schneider who heads
the school's language program, " I want them to come up with ideas."

Statements like these are unusual in Kosovo's higher education system,
where Ms. Schneider, who is from Springfield, Mass., and has more than a
decade of experience teaching English as a foreign language, says
students are treated all too often like unruly youths who should be seen
and not heard.

The university, where classes started Monday, joins dozens of private
schools and institutes that have sprung up in Kosovo since the end of
the war in the Serbian province in 1999.

Many of these schools are looking to the United States as an example,
and in particular at institutions that maintain close links to business
and industry.

"People wanted an American university, both as a model for education but
also as a vehicle for economic development" said Louis Sell, the
executive director of the American University in Kosovo Foundation,
which raises money for the school.

The university is financed almost entirely by Kosovo Albanians, and at
the start, offers a two-year associates degree in business and
economics. Classes are in English.

The Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y., is managing
the academic program for the school, which is starting with about 60
students. It plans to expand to four-year programs in the next two
years. Mr. Sell said one goal is to provide students with an education
that is relevant to the workplace. Students can expect to spend
substantial time in work-study placements with local businesses.

"It was always a dream for people here to study in a world-class
university," said Meliza Haradinaj, a 19-year-old entering student from
Pristina, the Kosovo capital. "So this is a brilliant opportunity to
study without having to go away."

The annual fee for the course is $5,500, not inexpensive in Kosovo,
where the average wage for those who have a job is about $150 a month.
But the costs, Mr. Sell says, are small compared with sending a student
to study elsewhere in Europe or the United States.

The local state-run university in Pristina, with more than 20,000
students, used to have the monopoly on higher education, but critics say
the courses there are increasingly irrelevant to student needs.

"I call the University of Pristina a mirage," says Akan Ismaili, 29, a
former student. "It was desperate. People didn't analyze anything." Mr.
Ismaili said that, when he attended, students in the school's
information technology course had little or no access to a computer.

Frustrated with his own experience, Mr. Ismaili help set up what is now
Kosovo's leading center for computer studies, partly financed by an
Internet service provider.

Inside their sleekly designed offices in the Pristina national library,
nearly five miles of cable enable students to set up and dismantle
Internet servers and networks. Courses, most operated in cooperation
with Cisco Systems, an American company, cover marketing, graphic design
and finance.

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