The first-ever national university in the Caucasus was opened in 1918 laying the foundation for a European-type higher school in Georgia, based on Georgian educational traditions. Today the Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University is the leader by its scales and quality of teaching. Over 20 000 students, including 439 foreign students, are undergoing studies at seven faculties of TSU (Exact and Natural Sciences; Humanities; Social and Political Sciences; Economics and Business; Psychology and Educational Sciences; Medicine; Law).
As a result of the Unified National Exams in 2014, about 4000 students were enrolled in TSU, including ethnic Abkhazian, Azerbaijani and Armenian students, who were enrolled in the Georgian language learning program.
The Tbilisi State University is leading by number of students, whose studies will be fully financed by the state, as well as by number of students with partial financing.
Presently, 212 accredited educational programs are implemented at TSU, including 65 undergraduate programs; 3 one-step programs; 90 postgraduate programs; 42 doctoral degree programs; 9 vocational programs and 3 Georgian language learning programs (for ethnic Azerbaijani, Armenian and Abkhazian students).
Tuition rate is GEL 2250 per year.
3635 students will be enrolled in bachelor’s degree program during the 2015-2016 academic year. The state will fully finance the studies of 1225 students on the following academic programs: philology (Georgian language and literature) – 200; history – 150; archaeology – 25; philosophy – 25; education – 25; mathematics – 100; physics – 100; chemistry – 100; biology – 100; economics – 400. Moreover, 70%, 50% and 30% state grants will be provided to other directions. 396 students (ethnic Abkhazian, Azerbaijani and Armenian students) will be enrolled in the Georgian language learning program. TSU students are served by 82 laboratories; 8 resource centers; 9 computer centers; library with over 3.5 million books; 9 reading halls; multimedia center; fine art studio; museum with unique exhibits; sports halls for mini football, arm-wrestling, archery, table tennis, handball, athletics; two conference halls in Buildings I and VIII; choreography hall; rehearsal halls for “TSU Gordela”; student theatre “Skhveni” (Garret), etc. Students have vast opportunities to get involved in sports and culture events.
The Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University offers the following foreign language and joint educational programs:
Foreign language programs for undergraduate students: Faculty of Social and Political Sciences: Journalism and Mass Communication (Georgian-Russian language); Faculty of Humanities: Caucasiology (Russian language); Russian Philology (Russian language); Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences: Computer Sciences (French language); Faculty of Medicine: Medicine (English language).
Foreign language programs for postgraduate students: Faculty of Law: Public Administration (with the German University of Administrative Sciences Speyer); postgraduate programs at the University of Cologne; Faculty of Humanities: Caucasiology (Russian language), Slavic Philology (Russian language), Translation and Intercultural Relations (on the basis of Georgian and English languages); Faculty of Economics and Business: Economics (International School of Economics (ISET) English-language postgraduate program); Managing International Enterprises (a double-degree joint master program of the Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University and the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena (Germany). Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences: Applied Biosciences (English language); Medical Molecular Biology (English language); University of Westminster; Electronic Engineering (English language, undergraduate program of San Diego State University); Computer Engineering (English language, undergraduate program of San Diego State University); Chemistry-Biology (English language, undergraduate program of San Diego State University); Faculty of Social and Political Sciences: Gender Research (interdisciplinary, English language); Eurasian and Caucasian Studies (English language); European Studies (Interfaculty, English language).
The 2014 scientific statistics – according to Elseviers Scopus database, 372 publications were released, including 174 in physics and astronomy; 74 in mathematics; 51 in engineering sciences and 27 in medicine. In 2014 TSU implemented 212 grants (total cost – GEL 21 867 710.8, EUR 249 000 and USD 1 026 688), including:
National (including joint contests) – 193 (total cost – GEL21 867 710.8, EUR 249 000 and USD 317 059); International – 19 (total cost – USD 709 629).
According to general statistics of scientific projects funded by the Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation, a total of 22 projects were financed with 9 projects from TSU.
In frames of the Targeted Research and Development Initiatives Program, as a result of joint competition of the Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation and the Science and Technology Center in Ukraine in 2014, 11 projects were financed, including 4 from TSU.
43 projects, including 12 from TSU were financed as a result of state research grant competition providing international research scholarships to young scientists in 2014.
14 projects, including 4 from TSU were financed as a result of state research grant competition “Research with Secondary School Students’ Participation.”
In 2014 TSU launched the postdoctoral project, which enables PhD students to get jobs at the university. Presently, an open competition is announced for 6 vacancies; 8 persons are participating in the competition. Final decision will be made in March.
The Ivane Javakhishvili Science Forum was established in 2014. In frames of the forum the author of the best scientific paper – representative of academic personnel, BA student, MA student and PhD student will be selected from each faculty. GEL 5 000 prize will be allocated per paper for academic personnel selected by the faculty; GEL 500 – for BA student; GEL 1000 for MA student and GEL 1500 for PhD student.
TSU plans to launch purpose-oriented science projects in frames of which, along with already existing financing, the university will allocate funding for separate faculties – total funding GEL 525 thousand, of which GEL 75 thousand will be allocated to each faculty.
“We decided to promote student involvement in scientific activities and therefore we set up a special foundation, which will finance purpose-oriented science programs. In order to promote young scientists, the programs, which were launched last year, will be continued and they will stimulate university science, professors and students,” TSU Rector, Academician Vladimer Papava said commenting on this idea.
TSU unites 14 scientific institutions and the national scientific library. Total financing of science will increase 2.5-fold y/y (from GEL 4 458 600 to GEL 11 243 020).
TSU against violation of academic ethics - along with announcing 2015 as the Year of Science, Rector Papava also focused on violation of academic ethics, including plagiarism, compilation, reacting on the facts of violation of academic ethics and other violations. “This problem has been persisting in Georgia for a long time. The university has no tools to prevent plagiarism. Therefore, we decided to adopt regulations that would prevent not only plagiarism, but also any facts of scientific misconduct. These regulations were developed as a result of six-month work and they clearly define what particular decisions should be made in case of scientific misconduct. The facts of violations of academic ethics are studied by the commission composed of academic staff and decisions are made by the Academic Council. Five complaints have been filed and decisions have already been made in respect of three complaints; plagiarism was confirmed only in one case; the commission is still working over two other complaints,” Rector Papava said.
All measures taken by the university to promote research activities and raise its quality are ultimately aimed at increasing the university’s reputation to ensure that any person is proud of carrying out research activities or studying at TSU.
International electronic resources for TSU students and professors – each year the library renews its book fund and offers TSU students, professors and staff an access to the TSU library and international digital library databases.
The TSU library electronic resources consist of two parts: the first part involves scanned dissertations, books, journals and newspapers of the TSU library fund and the second part represents the unity of international library databases of two categories – databases of payable publications and free databases. The price of payable databases is basically paid by the university. This category contains extremely famous databases, such as Econlit, Jstor and Scopus. These databases are selected taking into consideration the needs of TSU users. Number of free databases is increasing constantly. One of these days the Information Technology Department of the TSU Library will post on the library website new links of international resources, which will be useful for those professors and students from TSU faculties, who are carrying out research activities. In addition, guidelines for using Scopus databases will be posted in Georgian. Usage of all possible resources will ensure access to hundreds of thousands of books, journal articles, citation indices and other materials.
Technically it is quite easy to gain direct access to the databases from the university computers using Wi-Fi (only some databases require simple registration for obtaining a password). It is convenient that access is available beyond the university area too, by using the university’s electronic mail.
According to the statistical data at our disposal, in 2014 about 4500 persons used the Scopus databases. About 700 persons used EBSCO databases. It is impossible to specify how many students or how many professors were among them. Interest towards databases is largely determined by how much qualified paper a scientist is writing or what are the scales of education a student aspires to receive.
EBSCOHost (
www.search.epnet.com) is one of the most multi-profile databases out of TSU Library digital resources, which provides access to scientific literature of various branches, annotations and review materials. It offers access to a lot of bibliographic and patent full-text databases from leading information suppliers. Royal Society Journal Collection (
http://royalsocietypublishing.org) includes peer-reviewed journals in physical and biological sciences. TSU students and other interested persons can search medical electronic resources at England Journal of Medicine (
www.nejm.org). It concentrates the results of new medical research in biomedicine and clinical practice, peer-reviewed articles and thematic reports. Oxford Textbook of Medicine (
www.oxfordmedicine.com) database also offers a diversity of medical materials to students and branch specialists. Electronic books and journals, as well as charts and schemes are available there. BioOne (
www.bioone.org) contains materials in biology, ecology and environmental protection. Users can familiarize themselves with the studies, published by research communities, museums and other research organizations that are members of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. Interested persons are able to search the meaning of words, their etymology, synonyms, and peculiarities of their usage in the database: Oxford Online Dictionary (
www.oed.com). This is an online dictionary, which contains millions of words. OESD- Library (
www.oecd-ilibrary.org) contains materials from various fields, such as economics, agriculture, regional and urban development, finances, trade, education, social sciences, technologies, healthcare, transport, etc.
Electronic database Cambridge Journals Online (
www.journals.cambridge.org) offers its users over 300 scientific journals issued by the Cambridge University, which properly cover modern scientific problems. Moreover, with the mediation of the TSU Department of Scientific Research and Development, the following e-library databases have been purchased recently: JSTOR (
www.jstor.org) is one of the richest electronic databases, which contains electronic books and journals from the following spheres: business and economics, humanitarian disciplines, law, medicine, exact and natural sciences, social-political sciences, etc.
HINARI (Health Access to Research Initiative) (
www.who.int/hinari) is an electronic database established by the World Health Organization, which contains one of the world largest collections in the fields of biomedicine and healthcare. The electronic database contains the materials of over 150 publishing houses, among them Blackwell, Elsevier Science, Springer Verlag, the Harcourt Worldwide STM Group, Wolters KluwerInternational Health & Science, etc. HINARI contains 11 400 electronic journals in 30 languages and 18 500 books. Besides these databases, TSU students and professors have access to free electronic resources, where a person of any profession can find any desirable literature.
In future the TSU Library plans to purchase quite an important and diverse library database – Wiley-Blackwell Standard Journal Collections. This database contains electronic resources of research activities carried out in technical, humanitarian, social fields, as well as in the field of medical sciences. The goal of the university community is to gain access to electronic resources of the world famous and leading publishing companies, such as Elsevier or Thomson Reuter.
By providing access to databases, the university assists researchers and students in carrying out scientific and research activities.
International and Exchange Programs at TSU
Participation in international and exchange programs is one of those opportunities for TSU students, which they use successfully each year. Since 2006, 636 students from TSU have undergone their studies in European higher educational institutions through exchange programs. Only in 2014-2015, 132 students have been involved in exchange programs – this figure has significantly increased compared to previous years. These are the data of only those students, who participated and won in the competitions administered by the Foreign Relations Department of TSU. The university faculties are also implementing exchange programs independently. Thus, much more students are involved in exchange programs of foreign higher educational institutions. This time we will focus only on a part of them: University of Tartu (Estonia); University of Latvia (Latvia); University of Vilnius (Lithuania); Comenius University in Bratislava (Slovakia); Viadrina European University (Germany); Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania); Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic); Masaryk University (Czech Republic); University of Warsaw (Poland); Leiden University (Holland); Gumilyov Eurasian National University (Kazakhstan); Østfold University College (Norway); University of Oslo (Norway); University of Salerno (Italy); Ca Foscari University of Venice (Italy); Saarland University (Germany); University of Jena (Germany); University of Giessen (Germany); University of Munich (Germany); University of Potsdam (Germany) – this is only a small list of universities, where TSU students have been deepening their knowledge in recent years.
Head of the TSU Foreign Relations Department, Tea Gergedava explains: “Exchange programs enable the university to further expand international cooperation and provide more opportunities to TSU students and professors in terms of their mobility.” Presently, the TSU Foreign Relations Department administers 3 Tempus projects, 6 Erasmus Mundus projects and 1 EACEA Marie Curie project, as well as bilateral university exchanges – at the Department of Georgian Language, Culture and Society at Leiden University and TSU School of Entrepreneurship for Students (together with the Foreign Ministry of Estonia).
In 2013 TSU joined new projects: ERASMUS MUNDUS EMBER, ERASMUS MUNDUS HERMES, TEMPUS PACT (Project Actors Capacity Training in Caucasus) TEMPUS PICASA (Promoting Internationalisation of HEIs in Eastern Neighbourhood Countries through Cultural and Structural Adaptations). At the same time, TEMPUS LA MANCHE project (Leading and Managing Change in Higher Education) is being implemented at the university. The project will last for 36 months and it covers 2012-2015 years. The La MANCHE consortium is coordinated by International University College, Bulgaria. The project focuses on building governance and management capacities at the Partner Countries’ Higher Education Institutions. Over a period of three years the project will initiate and stimulate sustainable dialogue on Higher Education reforms among relevant interest groups. In addition, La MANCHE will empower students to become more actively involved in the decision making processes at institutional level.
TSU PhD students, academic and administrative staffs are already involved in IRSES project “Possibilities and limits, challenges and obstacles of transferring CEE EU pre-accession best practices and experience to Moldova’s and Georgia’s pre-accession process (EU- PREACC), which was launched on March 1, 2013 and will last till February 28, 2017. Its main partners are: University of Tartu; State Universities of Vilnius and Moldova. It consists of four working packages and is linked with those reforms, which are related to EU accession.
Erasmus Mundus is a cooperation and mobility programme in the field of higher education that aims to enhance the quality of European higher education and to promote dialogue and understanding between people and cultures through cooperation with Third Countries. In addition, it contributes to the development of human resources and the international cooperation capacity of higher education institutions in Third Countries by increasing mobility between the European Union and these countries. During the current academic year 70 Georgian students, researchers and university employees left for the partner universities to undergo their studies or raise their qualification there. Erasmus Mundus covers three target groups for individual mobility flows corresponding to three different target beneficiaries and five different types of individual mobility flows: undergraduate, master, doctorate, post-doctorate and academic/administrative staff.
Study abroad scholarships are extremely important for TSU students. Such scholarships are provided for medical students by the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Klinikum Chemnitz, where the language of instruction is German and English.
Scholarships are also provided for the university’s undergraduate and postgraduate students by the embassies accredited in Georgia, particularly by the governments of Egypt, Czech Republic, Turkey and China. Tea Gergedava explains that in order to expand education area, beside the donor organizations’ projects, TSU is also cooperating with educational institutions of over 100 countries that aims at promoting international exchange of academic staff, students, research materials, educational and development programs. These institutions are: University of Graz in Austria; National University of La Plata in Argentina; Northeastern Illinois University, New Jersey City University and North Carolina University; Pepperdine University School of Law; St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia; Universities of Bordeaux (France), Latvia and Jena, etc. To ensure that students and professors are systematically involved in the sphere of international education, the TSU Foreigh Relations Department is regularly working in new directions. Last year it expanded its scales of cooperation and covered China, South Africa and Argentina.
Students from various countries are studying at the Tbilisi State University. Only during the autumn semester of the 2014-2015 academic year, the Foreign Relations Department hosted 26 foreign exchange students (14 students – in frames of bilateral agreements; 12 students – in frames of Erasmus Mundus project).
