Report Urges Sweeping Changes in Higher Education Across the Arab World

[Harold Schiffman]

 http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/02/1535n.htm
Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Report Urges Sweeping Changes in Higher Education Across the Arab World

By AISHA LABI

The educational systems of many countries in the Middle East and North
Africa need a complete overhaul, warns a World Bank report released
this week.Despite strides in the region over the past 40 years, the
report, "The Road Not Traveled: Education Reform in the Middle East
and North Africa," warns that "the relationship between education and
economic growth has remained weak, the divide between education and
employment has not been bridged, and the quality of education
continues to be disappointing."

The report emphasizes that the quality of education varies
significantly from country to country within the region. It describes
Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Tunisia, for example, as relatively
"successful in providing access to reasonable-quality education for
most of their populations." At the other extreme, it mentions
Djibouti, Iraq, Morocco, and Yemen as countries where eradicating
illiteracy remains a basic challenge.

Despite such disparities, the region's countries have core
similarities as well. Populations in the Middle East and North Africa
are among the youngest and fastest growing in the world, trends that
have added to the pressures on educational systems already
underequipped to meet modern economic demands. The report deals with
all levels of education, and stresses that the challenges facing the
region must be dealt with across the board, with systematic reforms
beginning at the elementary level and continuing through higher
education.

The report covers a span of territory roughly corresponding to the
Arab world, bounded by Morocco on the west and Iraq on the east, and
including Iran and the West Bank and Gaza, but omitting Israel. Its
finding largely echoes those in reports issued in 2002 by the World
Economic Forum (The Chronicle, September 16, 2002) and in 2003 by the
United Nations Development Program and the Kuwait-based Arab Fund for
Social and Economic Development (The Chronicle, October 21, 2003).


A Mismatch of Education and Jobs

The fundamental problem facing Middle Eastern and North African
universities is "a mismatch between the higher-education system and
the labor market," Michal J. Rutkowski, director of the World Bank
department responsible for producing the report, said in a telephone
interview on Tuesday. "What is happening in the region is that
universities and higher-education institutions are producing graduates
who aren't finding jobs." The unemployment rate in the region is, on
average, 14 percent higher than in every other region in the world,
with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa. The rate is higher among
college graduates than among less-educated people, the report says.

In market economies, inequalities in education levels translate
directly into inequalities in incomes, but in the Middle East and
North Africa such disparities are reversed. The explanation, Mr.
Rutkowski said, lies not necessarily within the higher-education
systems, but in the nature of those economies and how their labor
markets function. "The key issue," he said, "is the dominance in the
labor market of the civil service, which tends to be very large and to
offer salaries above the market level." That public-sector dominance
presents a dilemma for higher-education institutions struggling to
formulate curricula to prepare graduates for professions. "They want
to know what skills will be in demand in the future, and they simply
don't know," said Mr. Rutkowski.


A Mix of Public and Private Funds

Universities in the region must also be able to better tap into
private financing to complement the public funds on which most remain
entirely dependent, said Mr. Rutkowski. In many respects, the issues
mirror those facing other regions. In Europe, for example, many
universities are increasingly focused on winning private donations,
and countries like France are struggling with the economic demands of
a bloated civil service. "This is a broader challenge for the whole
world," Mr. Rutkowski said, "to recognize that higher education has
significant public benefits, but also significant private benefits,
and because of that, financing for higher education should be a mix of
public and private funds."

The beginning of the solution for the Middle East and North Africa is
to introduce better incentives and more public accountability at all
levels of the education system, the report concludes. "Good teachers
or good universities need to be rewarded, while bad ones go out of
business," said Mr. Rutkowski. The bright spots in the region, he
said, come from those countries, such as Jordan, Kuwait, and Lebanon,
that have already begun to introduce better evaluation and monitoring
measures and a greater mix between public- and private-sector
participation.


http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/02/1535n.htm

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