The Civil Rights Act of 1964 has a Title VI. The Higher Education Act of 1965 has a different Title VI. Same number. Different statute. Different agency. Different rules. The first one is about who federally funded providers must serve. The second one is about who the federal government pays to teach less commonly taught languages — including Albanian.
This article is about the second one. If you’re looking for the language-access piece, that’s the Civil Rights Act Title VI article.
Two Title VIs (don’t confuse them)
Both statutes were signed by Lyndon Johnson within a year of each other. Both originate in part from the National Defense Education Act of 1958 — Eisenhower’s Sputnik-response legislation that for the first time committed federal money to language and area studies, on the theory that a country in a Cold War needs to read its rivals’ newspapers.
When the Higher Education Act passed in 1965, the international and foreign-language pieces of NDEA Title VI were folded into HEA Title VI. The Civil Rights Act Title VI is its own statute (42 U.S.C. § 2000d) administered by every agency that distributes federal money. HEA Title VI is administered by the US Department of Education’s Office of International and Foreign Language Education (IFLE).
If you ever see “Title VI” referenced in an academic press release, it’s almost always HEA Title VI. If you see it in a hospital compliance memo, it’s almost always Civil Rights Act Title VI. Same name, two different doors.
What HEA Title VI funds
HEA Title VI Part A authorizes seven programs. Three of them matter for Albanian:
- National Resource Centers (NRC) — institutional grants to US universities to operate area-studies centers covering specific world regions. Albanian sits inside the Russian/East European/Eurasian Studies (REEES) regional umbrella, alongside Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and the languages of the former Soviet space.
- Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships — student fellowships, awarded by the institution holding the NRC grant, for graduate and undergraduate study of less commonly taught languages.
- Language Resource Centers (LRC) — funding for centers that develop curriculum, assessment tools, and teacher training across language families.
Grants run on four-year cycles, awarded competitively through Federal Register notices. The most recent competition funded the FY 2022–2025 cycle. The Department of Education published the next NRC/FLAS notice on August 27, 2024, with awards setting the FY 2026–2029 landscape.
FLAS: real money for less commonly taught languages
FLAS is the program a graduate student or undergraduate applies to directly. Here’s what the Department of Education currently posts for FLAS award levels:
- Academic year, graduate: $20,000 stipend + up to $18,000 institutional payment for tuition and fees. Total package up to $38,000.
- Academic year, undergraduate: $5,000 stipend + up to $10,000 institutional payment. Total up to $15,000.
- Summer (graduate or undergraduate): $3,500 stipend + up to $5,000 institutional payment. Total up to $8,500.
Eligibility: US citizen, national, or permanent resident; enrolled at an institution that holds an NRC grant; demonstrating commitment to a relevant world area; studying a modern foreign language at the appropriate level. Undergraduates specifically must be studying a less commonly taught language at intermediate or advanced level — the program is not for first-semester learners on the undergrad side.
Albanian sits comfortably in the LCTL pool. It’s not English, French, German, Spanish, or any of the most-commonly-taught languages, and it’s the language of an EU candidate country, a NATO member, and a sizable US diaspora. Whether any given REEES NRC dispenses FLAS dollars to Albanian study in any given year depends on that center’s allocation.
Where US universities currently teach Albanian (verified)
Pinning down which US universities offer Albanian instruction in a given semester takes care — programs come and go with the availability of an instructor. Here’s what we can verify is active in the 2025–2026 academic year:
- Harvard University. Albanian arrived in spring 2023, taught by Faton Limani in the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department. Cross-registration with Brown, Tufts, and MIT is part of the design. The article that launched the program identified Elementary Albanian I as the entry point with intermediate and advanced courses planned.
- Arizona State University. ASU’s Melikian Center / Critical Languages Institute runs three Albanian options through summer 2026 — First-Year Albanian online, First-Year Albanian with a four-week Tirana extension, and Second-Year Albanian in Tirana. Hours, credits, and prices are posted: 140 contact hours online, 160 in Tirana for second-year, $2,000 to $8,800 depending on configuration.
- Mercy University. Mercy in Dobbs Ferry, New York reports it is the only college offering Albanian language courses in New York State. Course numbers ALBA 115 (Albanian for Communication) and ALBA 116 (Communicating in Albanian).
- University of Wisconsin–Madison. UW-Madison houses the Slavic, Baltic, and Albanian Languages major with BA, MA, and PhD-track instruction. Thirteen BAs awarded in 2021–2022, three MAs the same year — small numbers, real degrees.
- DePaul University. DePaul lists ALB course descriptions in the official catalog under Albanian and Southeastern European Studies; course frequency varies by year.
- Indiana University Bloomington. IU’s Summer Language Workshop, founded 1950, runs through the Robert F. Byrnes Institute for Russian and East European Studies (REEI) and has historically included Albanian among its summer offerings.
- University of Pennsylvania. Penn added Albanian to its curriculum starting spring 2024 — the second Ivy League institution to do so after Harvard.
That’s seven verified institutions. Other universities have offered Albanian intermittently over the years; we’re not listing programs we can’t confirm are active in 2025–2026, because the floor for a useful list is “you can probably enroll there next semester.”
The 2022–2026 cycle and what’s at risk
The current NRC/FLAS cycle is mid-flight. Centers that won 2022 awards are operating year-four programs; FY 2025–2026 covers the closing chapter of the cycle. The next NRC and FLAS competition is FY 2026 — application notice already published, awards expected to set the funding landscape through FY 2030.
The 2025 funding picture got rougher than usual. Federal funding for the Title VI Language Resource Center program was abruptly discontinued mid-cycle, leaving LRCs unable to carry out year-four activities. ASEEES — the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the professional society Albanian-focused REEES centers belong to — issued advocacy statements urging Congressional support for continued Title VI funding through 2025 and 2026.
For perspective on dollar flow: UCLA was awarded approximately $8 million for the 2022–2026 cycle covering six area-studies centers. NRC budgets at major universities run in that range. FLAS allocations to a single REEES NRC typically fund a handful of graduate fellowships and a smaller number of undergraduate fellowships per year — not dozens.
What’s at risk in the FY 2026 competition is whether REEES centers continue at the same number, with the same allocation, on the same four-year cycle. The funding floor is contested. The program structure is intact.
What teaching infrastructure already exists
Beyond the universities that teach Albanian directly, a small national infrastructure supports the field. The Southeast European Language Resource Center at Duke University has supported Albanian teaching materials and assessment work since 1999, when SEELRC was first established under HEA Title VI Language Resource Center funding. The Global Language Online Support System hosted at the University of Chicago’s Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies offers 265 free online Albanian lessons among other Eastern European language collections — a public, no-cost resource that exists because HEA Title VI paid for it years ago.
Several REEES NRCs that don’t currently teach Albanian directly still have institutional ties to the language family — Stanford, University of Michigan (REEC was funded through the 2022 cycle but the FY 2026 status remains contested), University of Illinois, University of Texas at Austin. When a graduate student wants to study Albanian in summer, the Indiana University Summer Language Workshop has been the historical default since 1950, partly because IU holds REEES grants that allow FLAS dollars to flow toward Albanian summer study at IU’s own program.
The takeaway: the Albanian-language ecosystem in US higher education is small but real, with a few teaching sites, a couple of resource centers, and a federal funding spigot that has historically kept the lights on. The pieces are connected. When one piece changes — Harvard adding the course in 2023, Penn adding it in 2024, the LRC funding cut in 2025 — the connections matter.
How community-led data feeds the next funding decision
Federal NRC competitions weigh several criteria when scoring an application: the strength of the area-studies faculty, the depth of language instruction across the regional language family, the institution’s commitment, the quality of outreach, and the documented community of interest the center serves. Community-of-interest data is one input among several — but it’s the input that’s hardest for a non-Albanian-focused institution to fake.
The American Community Survey reports approximately 224,000 Albanian Americans. Community estimates that include ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, and second/third-generation Albanian Americans run closer to 1,000,000. The gap matters when an institution making the case for Albanian-focused programming wants to quote a real number rather than wave at “a sizable diaspora.”
NAR’s count is a community-led data layer that any REEES center applying for a FY 2026 NRC grant can cite. We don’t claim NAR’s count alone changes federal grant decisions — those decisions are about faculty depth and institutional commitment as much as community size. We do say that a documented community number is a stronger input than the alternative, and that an institution making a serious case for Albanian instruction at the next NRC cycle benefits from being able to point at a verifiable population beyond the ACS line.
The third Title VI — Title VIII
A small disambiguation note. There’s a separate State Department program called Title VIII (the Russian, Eurasian, and East European Research and Training Program) that funds advanced research and language training in REEES, including Albanian-related research at institutions like the Melikian Center at ASU. Title VIII operates on its own funding stream and competition cycle independent of HEA Title VI. If you’re an advanced graduate student researching Albania or the broader region, both programs can be in play — they’re complementary, not redundant.
Why the count matters here
The FLAS stipend doesn’t change because we counted ourselves better. The number of NRCs covering REEES doesn’t move because of one community survey. What does move is the marginal case — the case for one more Albanian language section, one more FLAS allocation to Albanian study, one more institutional commitment that wouldn’t happen without a documented population to point at.
Better counted equals better case. The 2026 NRC competition is the next decision point. The FY 2030 cycle decision is the one after that. The community count we build now is the input that’s still on the table by then. Be counted.