Around 2,000 fewer places for first-year students this academic year, across all universities. The deepest cuts land exactly where the unemployed graduates are: business administration, public administration, parts of the Economics and Law faculties.

Education and Science Minister Vesna Janevska spelled out what was left untouched: "The technical fields remained almost identical - IT, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, where employability is excellent, reaching 98-99 percent."

The decision is sound - and a generation late

Nobody sensible can argue the state should keep producing administration graduates for a market with nowhere to put them. Aligning the quotas with actual demand is the right move.

But that 98-99 percent employability figure in the technical fields is not new information. It has been known for years. So the question is not whether the decision is good, but how many cohorts enrolled in oversupplied programmes while those percentages sat on the table and nobody translated them into quotas.

Janevska is confident every student will find a place where they want to study. That sounds nice. Both things at once - 2,000 fewer places and everyone placed where they want - are hard to hold as true simultaneously.

The dorms are renovated, and the price rose by 70 percent

Two student dormitories are coming into use: Stiv Naumov from 1 October and Kuzman Josifovski-Pitu, probably from 1 November. The renovation is a real gain - student housing here has been a subject people discussed with embarrassment for decades.

Except that a place at Stiv Naumov went up from 3,500 to around 6,000 denars. For a student from outside the capital, a difference of 2,500 denars a month is not small change - that is several thousand denars a year a family has to find somewhere.

A renovated dorm that has moved out of reach of the person it was meant for is not a solved problem. It is a relocated one.

Parliament blocked, the laws waiting

Three laws on higher education and science are stuck in parliament - the Albanian opposition bloc is demanding the Badinter principle be applied when they are passed. Janevska said she hopes "reason will prevail" and pointed out it is already late.

So the reform everyone is talking about is unfolding while its legal framework hangs in the parliamentary chamber.

Four thousand fewer first-graders

And finally, the number that says the most about the future of the entire system: over 4,000 fewer children enrolled in first grade compared with last year. The minister says the figure is preliminary and will shrink by the end of September, that part of the reason is parents being slow to register and schools lagging behind in the e-register.

Maybe. But if even half of that number survives, then the debate about university quotas is a debate about phase two of a problem that begins in first grade.