Information Gap Hinders Coordination and Reform Among Arab Universities
The number of universities in the Arab world has nearly tripled in the last decade, yet a lack of information about institutional structure and quality remains an impediment to reform, regional coordination, and the kinds of international linkages Arab universities increasingly aspire to create.
The just-released report “Classifying Higher Education Institutions in the Middle East and North Africa: A Pilot Study,” based on a survey carried out by the Institute of International Education and the Lebanese Association for Educational Studies, with support from the Carnegie Corporation, is an attempt to address this dearth of information, and to lay the groundwork for a reliable regional classification system for higher-education institutions. Yet its writers did not have an easy time gathering the data they needed. The report is as much a plea for greater accountability and transparency as it is a preliminary categorization of universities across the Middle East and North Africa.
“We hope institutions in the region—the ones who responded and, most importantly, the ones that didn’t—will really look at this information and start thinking about what types of institutional data they need to start collecting in order to be recognized,” says Rajika Bhandari, deputy vice president of research and evaluation at the Institute of International Education and one the report’s authors.
The report surveys universities in Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates. It notes the extraordinary growth and variety of the higher-education sector in the Middle East. The number of higher-education students in the region has increased from 2.9 million in 1998-99 to 7.6 million in 2007-8. There are 467 universities today, compared with 174 just a decade ago, and more than 1,500 higher-education institutions, including community colleges and technical institutes.
Institutional models vary widely across the region, and include historic, religiously based universities, national universities, new private institutions, and foreign branch campuses. The Persian Gulf leads the region in terms of international engagement and the availability of private higher education.
The report classifies universities by size, type of curriculum, language of instruction, gender composition, international engagement, and other variables. But few universities shared information about several key indicators, such as their support for research, their teacher-student ratio, their faculty qualifications and publications, and their financial model.
In some cases, institutions are simply not in the habit of gathering such information, say the authors of the report.
“One of the eye-opening things for us,” says Ms. Bhandari, “was when we went out to collect information, and administrators turned around and said: You know, that’s a really interesting question, and no one has ever asked that question before.”