ARRIVALS: WELCOME TO ATHENS
THE transformation becomes visible somewhere north of central Athens, where the familiar city of pharmacies, apartment blocks, tutoring schools and illegally parked cars has acquired a new architectural form: the university campus that looks remarkably like an office building. International names and academic crests now appear along roads previously associated with insurance companies and shops selling bathroom fittings, while the words Global, European, American and University announce that something more consequential than office space is available upstairs.
Athens has begun to resemble Las Vegas, although not because of gambling. Greek higher education would never leave something as important as a child’s professional future to chance. The resemblance lies in the older Las Vegas proposition that there is no need to travel to Paris if somebody can build you Paris nearby. Athens is now applying the same principle to international education.
Cyprus is particularly accessible. During one afternoon I encountered enough institutional permutations to make it difficult to establish whether Cyprus had opened in Athens, Athens had opened in Cyprus, or both countries had temporarily agreed to suspend geography. An education consultant near Marousi sketched the emerging market for me on a napkin: the Greek University of Cyprus, Athens Campus, the Cyprus University of Greece, the New Cypriot University of Athens, and the venerable Old Cyprus University of Greece, which he conceded had been established the previous November.
He was particularly enthusiastic about the proposed Université Next to the Sorbonne. When I asked whether the institution was actually connected to the Sorbonne, he appeared surprised by the question and reminded me that the proposed name made no such claim. “It is next to it,” he said.
THE CONSTITUTION: A PROBLEM OF VOCABULARY
For decades, the Greek Constitution appeared unusually clear on the subject. Higher education was a public function and the establishment of university-level institutions by private persons was prohibited. Modernization therefore required less a frontal assault on the constitutional text than an advance in institutional vocabulary.
The new framework did not simply announce that private Greek universities could be established. Foreign universities could instead operate branches through a new legal architecture. The government presents the arrangement as expanding opportunity and internationalizing Greek higher education; opponents challenged the route on constitutional grounds, while the Council of State upheld the framework. The Constitution remains where it was. The universities have learned to arrive by another route.
The distinction matters greatly to constitutional lawyers and rather less to parents. Dimitris Karavangelis, whose daughter will begin Law this autumn, told me that he had specifically asked an admissions representative whether the institution was a private university. The representative spent approximately twenty minutes explaining why it was not. Karavangelis found the complexity reassuring. “If it was something suspicious,” he reasoned, “they would just say yes.”
THE GREAT NATIONAL QUESTION: WHAT WILL THE CHILD STUDY?
To understand the market, one must understand that Greek families do not consume higher education in the abstract. They consume professions. Few parents sit at a kitchen table in Peristeri hoping that their daughter will discover an aptitude for interdisciplinary liberal learning. The traditional taxonomy of human possibility is narrower and considerably easier to explain to relatives: the child may become a doctor, the child may become a lawyer, and the child may, under appropriate circumstances, become an engineer. Everything else requires a second sentence.
Medicine and Law consequently possess almost perfect market characteristics. “What does your son do?” can be answered with “Medicine,” after which everybody understands what has happened. “Cultural Studies” produces an immediate follow-up question concerning what the child will eventually become, at which point the degree is already defending itself.
The scarce commodity in Greek higher education was therefore never simply a university place. It was a place in a course your mother could explain to relatives.
MEDICINE: EVERY CHILD A DOCTOR
I met Eleni Papathanasiou outside an admissions presentation for a new medical program. Her son Nikos, nineteen, had wanted to become a doctor for as long as Eleni could remember, although when I asked when he had first expressed the ambition she thought for a moment and replied, “We decided when he was twelve.”
Nikos had not achieved the score required for admission to a public medical school. Eleni regarded this primarily as evidence of a defect in the admissions system. She could not understand how a few hours of examinations should determine an entire life, particularly when Nikos was, in her assessment, “very good with people.” Nikos stood beside us looking at his phone.
The family had considered sending him abroad, but the prospect revealed another structural problem. Nikos had never lived alone, rarely cooked and did not know which compartment of the washing machine received detergent. Eleni found the contradiction obvious: a young man apparently mature enough to train as a physician could hardly be expected to operate household appliances without supervision. The arrival of foreign medical education in Athens solved both problems. Nikos could pursue his vocation while remaining fourteen minutes from his mother’s kitchen.
LAW: JUSTICE FINDS A WAY
Giorgos Vlavianos had encountered a similar obstacle with his daughter Maria, who had always intended to study Law but had failed to obtain a place at a public law school. He described her as having possessed a strong sense of justice since childhood, “especially when something happens to her,” and saw little reason why examination performance should overturn so durable a professional identity.
The family initially explored universities abroad before discovering that international education could now move substantially closer to them. Vlavianos admitted that he could not explain the precise legal relationship between his daughter’s prospective Athens school and its foreign parent, despite having attended the presentation and asked several questions. He had, however, inspected the prospectus and the institutional crest. “Very serious logo,” he told me, in a tone suggesting that the remaining legal details could safely be left to specialists.
INTERNATIONALIZATION WITHOUT DEPARTURE
The strongest selling point of the emerging model may ultimately have little to do with pedagogy. It eliminates departure. For generations, Greek international education involved the traumatic spectacle of an eighteen-year-old leaving the paternal home: suitcases were purchased, mothers cried, fathers calculated rents in pounds, and children encountered washing machines.
The branch-campus model offers something closer to internationalization without mobility. A student can attend a British, Cypriot, French or American institution and still return home for dinner. One mother summarized the attraction with unusual precision: “My daughter gets the foreign degree, but I still know where she is.”
Even the possibility that Greece may eventually produce more doctors and lawyers than its labor market requires has acquired an optimistic interpretation. A higher-education consultant told me that medical and legal education should no longer be understood narrowly as preparation for medicine or law because both produce transferable skills. A medical graduate who eventually drove a city bus, for example, would substantially improve passenger safety: cardiac emergencies could be addressed before the next stop and minor dermatological concerns might be raised at traffic lights. A law graduate working in food delivery would bring unusual expertise to the contractual relations among platform, restaurant, driver and consumer. What appeared in older labor-market statistics as graduate underemployment could therefore be reconceptualized as “skills diffusion.”
THE UNIVERSITY OF RUMMIDGE ENTERS THE MARKET
The expansion has inevitably attracted institutions with varying financial profiles. Among those rumored to be exploring an Athens campus is the University of Rummidge, whose British parent is undergoing what Vice-Chancellor Sir Trevor Hardwicke-Fiennes described to me as “financially transformative renewal.”
Hardwicke-Fiennes rejected the suggestion that Rummidge’s financial difficulties might complicate international expansion. Bankruptcy, he explained, was an unnecessarily static description of what should instead be understood as involuntary strategic recapitalization. Greece remained attractive because of its strong family commitment to education and what his market research identified as “high parental willingness to pay for recognizable nouns.”
Rummidge’s preliminary Athens portfolio consequently consists of Medicine, Law, Business and Psychology, together with a master’s program in University Restructuring. When I asked whether the university was considering Philosophy, the video connection briefly froze. By the time it returned, Hardwicke-Fiennes had moved on to employability.
THE NEW ACADEMIC GEOGRAPHY
What is emerging across Athens is a peculiar form of cosmopolitanism in which institutions travel more than students. Foreign universities establish Greek branches, Cypriot institutions acquire Athens addresses, Greek universities expand abroad, and French affiliations generate institutional identities capable of sustaining lengthy conversations about what precisely is French.
An admissions adviser told me that families rarely ask the legal and organizational questions academics expect them to ask. Their concerns are more stable: whether the degree is recognized, how much it costs, whether the child can become a doctor and where the family should park during the admissions presentation. The last question, he said, is often the most difficult.
The government describes its ambition as making Greece an international educational hub. The emerging model may be more innovative than the familiar hub, because it minimizes the movement usually associated with one. Cyprus can come to Athens, Britain can come to Thessaloniki, and France can establish itself near a metro station, while Greek students acquire international qualifications without surrendering their bedrooms.
If the expansion continues, every major foreign university may eventually possess an Athens campus, every northern suburb may possess a medical school, and the long-standing gap between what Greek children qualify to study and what their families had already decided they would become may finally disappear.
At my final admissions fair I met Maria Kotsopoulou, whose eighteen-year-old daughter was considering her options. Kotsopoulou had listened patiently to presentations on Medicine, Law, Psychology and Business but seemed unusually troubled when we spoke. Her daughter, she explained, had recently begun talking about anthropology.
She lowered her voice before telling me that the family was hoping it was a phase.