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Orders of Magnitude

In this chapter I seek to define the educational universe under examination in broad statistical brush strokes. It is a large but moving target and risks being out of date within a few years. It moves also because there is no central database for education in the MENA and the Arab world. Tertiary-level institutions do not routinely contribute to and update data files on key indicators. For some, the data, such as graduation or retention rates, is distressingly incomplete. The Association of Arab Universities might logically be a data repository, but it is not, yet. Finally, definitions of data types are vague or inconsistent, starting with what is a tertiary-level institution.

Fortunately, UNESCO, ESCWA, the International Labour Organization (ILO), and the World Bank have developed over the years a broad range of statistical indicators covering the MENA and the rest of the world. They are supplemented by the various editions of the World Bank’s World Development Report, the Arab Human Development Report, and a series of reports on education under the auspices of the Arab Thought Foundation, among others.

As a result, I am confident that we can describe systems of education in the MENA with a fair degree of accuracy, although also with a generous margin of error.

Demographics

The single most important independent variable driving the shape of education in the region is demography. The rate of population growth in specific age cohorts sets the parameters of demand for various levels of education. In labor-exporting countries of the region, out-migration of school-age dependents can significantly modify basic demographic dynamics.¹ Likewise the massive in-migration of non-national labor in the oil-rich countries (above all, the GCC) boosts the demand for education far beyond the needs of the national population. Since the beginning of the civil war in Syria, something like four million refugees have poured into Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon, placing enormous burdens on all forms of social infrastructure, including schools.

The total population of the Arab world in 2014 was about 370 million and is projected to rise to about 575 million by 2050. Because I will frequently pull two other countries in the neighborhood, Iran and Turkey, into comparative analysis, I note here that their populations in 2012 stood at about 76 million and 74 million, respectively. Along with Egypt at about 85 million in the same year, we have the three giants of the MENA. Egypt’s population may reach 150 million by 2050.²

Fertility rates in the MENA have declined from their levels of two to three decades ago. Improved public health has led to reductions in infant mortality, while education and improved living standards have led to older ages at marriage and shorter child-bearing lifetimes. Today most countries in the MENA are at two to three live births per female in their child-bearing lives (Goujon and Barakat, 2010; Saxena, 2013).³ A fertility rate of two represents replacement, that is, two children replacing their mother and father, resulting in no net population growth. This demographic transition has already altered the age pyramids of most MENA societies. Even as fertility declines, the number of women entering child-bearing age increases (because they were born in the era of higher fertility) so that the absolute number of births goes up. Nonetheless, as shown in Figure 1.1, there is now a youth bulge of young adults eligible to enter the workforce or to go on to tertiary education.

The youth bulge is a two-edged sword. It could constitute what has been dubbed the ‘demographic dividend.’ In East Asia the economic transformations of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were based on the same demographic transition coupled with solid educational attainment K–12 and a massive shift of population from the countryside to the cities. This young, literate population became the backbone of the labor force in sectors such as textiles, automotives, and electronics, which led the Asian Tigers to prosperity. During the time the bulge dominates a country’s demographics, the employed age cohorts are large relative to the cohorts in childhood and those over sixty to sixty-five and no longer working. The so-called ‘dependency ratio’ shrinks, while the tax base expands.

Figure 1.1 Youth Bulge among Arab League Member States, 2016

Source: Cammack et al., 2017

The youth bulge therefore opens a window of opportunity. That window is already partially open in the MENA, but it will not remain so indefinitely (Dhillon and Yousef, 2009). Perry Cammack and colleagues (2017: 19) see the opening lasting thirty years, while Prem Saxena (2013: 28) puts it more generously at fifty years. These are time frames sufficiently long to lull political leaders into inaction. The kinds of action that would be appropriate is the subject of most of the rest of this study.

To date in the MENA we are seeing the other edge of the sword: youth as a source of instability, frustration, and political menace. The spread of basic education has been near universal, the move to the cities substantial, but high rates of youth employment and high rates of gross domestic product (GDP) growth have not followed. The Asian model cannot be replicated, as the global economy has changed profoundly. The MENA faces stiff competition from earlier entrants in global trade, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh among them. Private sectors in the MENA are anemic and risk averse. Robotics have reduced the need for assembly-line labor dramatically. The growth sectors of the future will need the products of the tertiary educational system or those with highly specialized vocational skills (Bishop, 2011).

The only effective safety net for youth in the MENA is the informal sector, which is a source of ingenuity far more than of innovation. Because it operates in a legal gray area, it cannot invest in capital goods or offer its employees training and sophisticated professional knowledge, or pensions and health insurance. It is a venue for deskilling. The public sector, by contrast, can offer all those perquisites, but it is saturated and trying to shed employees.⁴

If there is a solution to this riddle, education will be at its core.

Tertiary Education

While the countries of the MENA have extended primary and secondary education to the bulk of their citizens, the quality of that education is wanting. David Chapman and Suzanne Miric (2009) note that in several testing areas that are internationally comparable, the MENA has been losing ground to international peers. They note that because of the demographic transition, primary-school cohorts in some countries are declining, lowering the teacher–pupil ratio. Despite this favorable development, increased quality of outcomes has not followed. The MENA is failing to capitalize on some favorable demographics by changing the incentives of teachers, curricula, and teaching methods.⁵

Tertiary education has exploded in the last thirty years,⁶ both in terms of the number of IHLs and in terms of students. Bashshur (2004) notes that in 2003 there were 233 Arab universities, of which 188 had been created in the preceding thirty years. Ninety-three were opened in the decade 1993–2003, of which 51 were private.⁷ As we shall see going forward, this reflects the structural economic reforms underway in several Arab countries that curtailed public outlays and forced open the door for the private sector to enter the educational ‘market.’ By 2012 there were 206 public Arab universities and 193 private ones (Al Adwan, 2013). In 2001–2015 the numbers enrolled in Arab tertiary-level education rose from about five million to as many as nine million students (see Table 1.1). Despite the emergence of private institutions, the public sector still educated about 90 percent of all tertiary-level students until 2010 (Bhandari and El-Amine, 2011).

There can be a certain amount of false exactitude in statistical sources because the definitions of what is being measured are not always clear or consistent. Along with universities, tertiary institutions may include colleges, specialized institutes, and research centers, among others. Egypt in 2014 had 14 specialized government research centers, 219 centers under the auspices of ministries, and 114 centers at universities (ESCWA, 2014: 20). Student bodies may include distance learners. Faculty censuses may include double-counting, as many faculty members teach in more than one institution.

Turkey, Iran, and Israel are excluded from the totals for the Arab world. The Arab figures do not include four members of the League of Arab States: Comoros, Mauritania, Somalia, and Qatar. They would not significantly alter the totals. There is missing data, which, in the case of Iraq, could lower the totals appreciably.

Table 1.1 Higher Education Statistics in the Arab Region, 2011

In terms of sheer growth, the stars are Iran, Morocco, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Turkey. They all more than tripled enrollments over the period. This could be pure ‘massification,’ meaning quantity at the expense of quality, but it is probably better than its opposite. On that score only Tunisia seems to be retreating, with a real decline in enrollments between 2006 and 2015. We shall return to that point further on.

Table 1.2 Tertiary Enrollments in the MENA, 2000–2015

Gross Enrollment Ratio (GER)

UNESCO and the World Bank define the GER as the number of students enrolled at a given level of education, regardless of age, expressed as a percentage of the official school-age population corresponding to the same level of education. For the tertiary level, the population used is the five-year age group starting from the official high school graduation age. In practice, at the tertiary level, the GER covers the age cohort eighteen to twenty-three.

Everywhere in the world the GER is climbing. South Korea is the champion with over 90 percent of the eligible age cohort actually enrolled, while in the MENA, Yemen, before the regime collapse and civil war after 2011, had a GER of about 10 percent. Over two decades, from 1992 to 2012, the average world GER went from 14 percent to 32 percent (Duncan, 2015). While the world may not reach South Korea’s near universal level of tertiary education (the US, for example, is at about 62 percent), the trend is clear, and over time most countries will exceed 50 percent.

Table 1.3. Gross Enrollment Ratios, MENA plus Turkey, 2005 and 2015

Country	2005	2015
Algeria	20	37
Egypt	35	36
Iran	24	72
Iraq	16	16
Jordan	40	45
Kuwait*	24	27
Lebanon	46	43
Libya	56	61
Morocco	11	28
Oman	18	nd
Saudi Arabia	29	63
Sudan	nd	16
Syria	14	44
Tunisia	30	35
Turkey	31	85
Yemen	9	10

Source: A Decade of Higher Education in the Arab World (2005) and on-line data bank World Bank EdStats (2015) * The entries on Kuwait are inconsistent. UNESCO (2009) indicates a GER in 2005 of 49 percent. That is not consistent with its own database or with World Bank data. Given that civil wars have been raging in Libya and Syria since 2011, it is hard to give credence to their 2015 GERs.

The Arab world tracked that trajectory with a lag. In 1986, the average GER in the Arab world was 14.5 percent (Massialis and Jarrar, 1991: 30). By 2010, the average GER for nineteen Arab countries was 22 percent, with ten of the nineteen below 30 percent (inter alia, Buckner, 2011). The Arab region came in sixth out of eight regions (ahead only of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia; UNESCO, 2009: 41). Jaramillo (Jaramillo and Melonio, 2011) stresses the different positions of Arab countries in the demographic transition as crucial to understanding future GERs, but she may have underestimated the overwhelming impetus to massification even in countries where fertility has sharply declined. She projects a GER for the Arab world of 41 percent in 2030 (Jaramillo and Melonio, 2011: 23). Jaramillo wrote that before the Arab uprisings of 2011 and the subsequent civil wars that have presumably wreaked havoc with GERs in Syria, Libya, Yemen, and, to a lesser extent, Iraq.⁸ A recent Arab Human Development Report joins in the lament of low GERs and surmises, “That colleges and universities have not significantly boosted their intake rates partly reflects the growing disenchantment of youth with the value of higher education amid the glut of unemployed graduates on the job market” (UNDP and AFESD, 2016: 31).

Let us review a few country cases to get a better sense of meaningful detail and variations.

Lebanon

Keeping in mind that in Lebanon tertiary education is split evenly between the one public university, Lebanese University, and dozens of private institutions, the evolution of the GER is similar to that of many other Arab states. Lebanon started, in 1970, at a higher level than most states: over 17 percent. By 2005, it had doubled that level, but has stagnated since. It made great progress (as did many other Arab states) in improving female GERs, such that they overtook those of males by 1996 and have maintained that edge ever since. Figure 1.2 shows Lebanon’s progress, along with Jordan, the strongest in the Arab world.

Figure 1.2. Net Enrollment Rates for Lebanon and Jordan in Tertiary Education (%)

Source: Chaaban, 2015

Egypt

During the presidency of Anwar Sadat in the 1970s, there was a major expansion of regional universities, but without adequate preparation of physical premises and teaching staff. Still, the effect was to raise Egypt’s GER significantly.

Egypt’s GER in 2013 was about 23 percent and grew to 26 percent in two years. The goal, according to Ashraf Hatem, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Universities (SCU), is to reach 45 percent by 2023 (interview, 2013). Given what Iran and Turkey have achieved in recent years, that goal may be attainable, although it will require greater public outlays (see pages 41–44) and significant expansion of private IHLs.

Israel

While I do not pay systematic attention to Israel in this study, the question of Israeli GERs warrants mention. In 2011 the Israeli tertiary GER, according to the World Bank, was 62.5 percent—about the same as that of the US. But if we break out the Arab portion of Israeli citizens, we find that in 2006, 9.7 percent of eligible Arabs were enrolled in higher education. By 2016 that proportion had risen to 16 percent (Brummer, 2017). Israel is surely not alone in the region in discriminating against minorities in access to higher education, but the ratio of 62.5 to 16 is glaring. There has been improvement since 2016.

Iran

Despite an eight-year war with Iraq, a temporary shuttering of universities in 1980, and heavy economic sanctions applied by the US and the international community, Iran made prodigious progress in extending higher education to its citizens (see IIE, 2015; Faek, 2016; Harris, 2014)

Iran has over 4.5 million tertiary-level students. Sixty percent of them are women, according to government statistics. In 1999 Iran’s tertiary GER was 19 percent, rising to 58 percent in 2013 and then 72 percent in 2015. In comparison to the rest of the Middle East, Iran’s education system is academically competitive, and Iranian parents are spending $2.1 billion annually on their children.

Part of Iran’s success is due to a private university, Islamic Azad University, founded in 1982 by Hashemi Rafsanjani, who had been close to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini. Azad University today may have as many as 1.5 million students throughout Iran (as well as branches abroad). It may be the world’s largest university (Labi, 2008). Because of it and other private institutions, over 50 percent of tertiary-level students are enrolled in private institutions. In this explosion in private tertiary education, Iran may be the bellwether for the region as a whole.

The Maghreb

Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia were colonized by France and to some extent mimicked the elitism of French higher education in the post–Second World War era (Vermeren, 2002). Algeria has been the most aggressive in moving toward massification, but all three are trending in the same direction.

In 2008 Morocco launched its educational emergency plan (Plan d’Urgence) that singled out low high school enrollments (about 50 percent of the eligible age cohort) and tertiary enrollments (a GER at that time of about 11 percent) as particularly egregious shortcomings in the system (see Kingdom of Morocco, 2008).

Tunisia is something of an anomaly. Its university population peaked in 2009 at 360,000, and then declined to 292,000 in 2014. It restored positive growth in 2015, but its progress appears to be slowing. High school enrollments peaked in 2004. The private tertiary sector grew from 1.1 percent of total enrollments in 2007–2008 to 9.4 percent in 2014–2015, adding about 30,000 students (Boughazala et al., 2016: 5; Assaad et al., 2017). The populations of Tunisia and Lebanon are the most rapidly aging in the Arab world, and they are further along the demographic transition. Their slowly growing tertiary GERs reflect that fact.

Libya demonstrates the variety typical of tertiary institutions. There are twelve public universities, five private universities, sixteen state technical faculties, and ninety-one higher technical and vocational institutes. Libya has half a million students in all fields of higher education, of which more than half (59 percent) are female. Most students (around 90 percent) are enrolled in public universities (Law, 2014). Libya’s GER for 2015 is suspiciously high. It is hard to imagine 60 percent of eligible Libyans attending tertiary institutions in a country swamped by civil violence.

Syria

A few years before the beginning of the Syrian civil war, the country’s tertiary GER stood at about 21 percent (Buckner and Saba, 2010). The World Bank generously recorded a GER in 2015 of 44 percent. Given over 500,000 war-related deaths (as of 2018), more than six million displaced persons and refugees, and horrendous destruction in major cities such as Aleppo, Homs, Deir ez-Zor, and, to a lesser extent, Damascus, some observers believe the real GER is more like 6 percent.

Sudan

Sudan is an extreme example of a fairly widespread phenomenon in regional higher education. Colonel Omar al-Bashir seized power in a coup in 1989, and, without thorough planning, created eighteen new universities by 1995. He doubled enrollments in existing universities. This came at a time when public expenditures on all levels of education fell from 4.8 percent of GDP to 0.8 percent (Elnur, 1998: 308; Bishai, 2008). The regime did not undertake the training of the teaching and other staff that the new universities and increased enrollments would require. Under Anwar Sadat, Egypt’s president in the 1970s, something similar happened. Once again quality was sacrificed to quantity. Al-Bashir was driven from power by popular protests in 2019.

Turkey

Turkey’s GER, at 85 percent, is by far the star performer in the MENA region, if we believe the World Bank and UNESCO figures for 2015. UNESCO’s statistics below inflate Turkey’s GER even further, showing it as 94.7 for 2015.⁹

What is not in dispute are the major quantitative strides made in higher education under the governments of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which came to power in 2002.

Graduates and Dropouts

Table 1.4. Tertiary GERs for Turkey

It is hard to know which group is the more significant, those who successfully complete their tertiary education or those who drop out. Both are likely to suffer frustration and disillusionment in the face of a public sector that no longer needs them and a private sector for which they are not appropriately educated. It is important to note that high dropout rates are a global norm. Over a third of tertiary students in better-off countries do not complete their degrees (The Economist, 2018a).

We begin our MENA story with the successful graduates.¹⁰ Table 1.5 shows modest growth in graduates, reflecting basic demographics and a growing GER. Oman is the star performer. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) does very well, but it is important to note that the UAE, unlike the rest of the Arab world, may have enrollments of non-nationals outnumbering those of nationals. These are very much orders of magnitude, given missing data for a number of entries. To give a truer picture and to calculate totals, I estimated Lebanon’s 2015 graduates to be 35,000. With that caveat in mind, the average annual growth rate in graduates over the eight-year period is a feeble 2.9 percent.

Table 1.5. Number of Tertiary-level Graduates, 2004–2015, Select Countries

I know of no reliable source on MENA-wide retention rates, graduation rates, or dropout rates. They all reflect the proportion of students entering tertiary education who actually earn certification. If we look at the totals on Arab enrollments in Table 1.2 and the numbers graduating in Table 1.5, we see that in 2015 about 18 percent of the total enrolled actually graduated. One has to make some heroic assumptions to interpret these figures: first, that we are dealing mainly with four-year programs, and, second, that the four cohorts are of roughly equal size. On that basis there would appear to be an attrition rate of 7–8 percent over the four years.

This is not bad, but it is not credible. We know that in the US graduation rates on average are much worse. Only 61 percent of tertiary students complete their degrees within eight years of beginning them, and for those in two-year programs (community colleges) the rate is 21 percent (Koropeckyi, Lafakis, and Ozimek, 2017: 3). By some accounts Argentina wins the dubious accolade of the highest dropout rates in the world, stubbornly stuck at around 70 percent of those who begin tertiary programs (Kelly, 2013; Hurtado, 2015).

Morocco, which has moved to a three-year undergraduate degree (see Chapters 6 and 7), provides more detail than most Arab countries. In a survey of three universities’ ‘open-access’ faculties, meaning faculties with no entry requirements other than the high school baccalauréat, “only a third, on average, of students in all [three] cohorts succeed in winning the basic license” (Kingdom of Morocco, 2018: 22). An online source in 2017 cites official figures: “58 percent of Moroccan Students Enrolled in Universities Do Not Graduate” (Moroccan World News, 2017). The report goes on to say that, beginning with the 2009–2010 cohort, the rate of credentialing in three to four years dropped continually: 26.4 percent for the 2009–2010 cohort, 25 percent for 2010–2011, and 20 percent for 2011–2012, reaching its lowest level ever in 2012–2013 at 19 percent (Kingdom of Morocco, 2018: 23). As we shall see, these were years of strenuous educational reform (Chapter 6).

Some sources indicate much more dramatic attrition. An internal assessment at Mohammed V University, Souissi (MVUS), noted an attrition rate in the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences of 60 percent (Kingdom of Morocco, 2007: 122). Even highly selective schools such as the Institut Agronomique et Vétérinaire Hassan II in Morocco saw an attrition rate of 20 percent between first and second year (Ouattar, interview, 2014).

One of the obstacles facing new students in Morocco is the shift from Arabic to French in a range of courses. As Pierre Vermeren (2002) has chronicled, the rapid expansion of primary and secondary education in the Maghreb coupled with Arabization put many students at a disadvantage once they reached the tertiary level, which was and is taught mainly in French. Add to this the costs, other than tuition, associated with higher education—lodging, transportation, meals, books—and one has the mix of factors that produce dropout rates that are especially high among the less privileged (Aziz, interview, 2018).

Dropouts matter for a host of reasons, some of which we will explore in other chapters (especially Chapter 8). For the moment let us note that those who drop out come disproportionately from less privileged strata of society, so that there are major equity and distributional consequences. For example, completion of degree as opposed to beginning the program may boost earnings by as much as 40 percent for a bachelor’s and 11 percent for an ‘associate’ degree (Koropeckyi, Lafakis, and Ozimek, 2017: 14).¹¹ Finally, depending on the true rate of attrition, IHLs may carry more faculty and non-academic staff than their actual enrollments require.

Other available sources on Arab/MENA retention rates are fragmented and anecdotal. Adriana Jaramillo summarized the situation some years ago:

Although 70 percent of universities stated that they conducted tracking surveys, information that could be used to develop performance indicators, such as completion rates, number of years it takes to complete a degree, and data on graduate labor market insertion, was not readily available. This corroborates once again that even if institutions make the effort to collect information, they seldom make it available to the public. (Jaramillo et al., 2012: 44)

Lebanese University, Lebanon’s only public university, has similar problems involving open admissions, poor preparation, and language of instruction. Out of 74,000 enrolled students, only about 7,000 graduate each year. Over four years that means that 28,000 graduate while 46,000 do not. That is financially and pedagogically crippling (Bitar, interview, 2012).

In general, nonselective majors disproportionately attract the least well-prepared students. They struggle with everything: skeptical parents, outlays on food, housing, and transport, sometimes coping with a poorly understood language of instruction (English or French), absentee instructors, and so forth. The underprivileged are given a chance, but the deck is stacked against them.¹²

The Corps of Instructors

Table 1.6 outlines the broad dimensions of active faculty in tertiary education in most of the countries of the MENA. It also shows instructor-to-student ratios by country. In that respect Lebanon and Tunisia are the regional leaders. The Lebanese ratio is suspiciously low.¹³ The high Sudanese ratio reflects the under-resourced expansion of the university system mentioned above.

As of 2009 it was estimated that about one-third of all faculty members in the region were female (MBRF and UNDP, 2009).

Table 1.6. Number of Professors in Higher Education, MENA plus Turkey

On the whole these are respectable ratios, but they mask a couple of important phenomena. In some heavily enrolled, nonselective majors in the humanities, social sciences, religious studies, commerce, and teaching, enrollments are very large and teaching faculty relatively few. So the instructor to student ratio tends to be well above 1:30.¹⁴ Second, the opening of new campuses gave rise to commuting faculty teaching at more than one institution. I have not seen any systematic study of this phenomenon (some of it may be beneath the radar as it may be disallowed by the faculty member’s primary employer). So, the gross figures of faculty numbers need to be treated cautiously because of double and even triple counting.¹⁵

Level and Type of Study

The IHLs of the MENA are overwhelmingly focused on undergraduate education (BAs, BScs, license). There are not yet research universities with large populations of PhD candidates and graduate students earning professional certification. One recent entrant in higher education, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, is entirely graduate- and research-oriented. So far it is unique. So is its very large endowment. It will be hard to emulate.

In Chapter 6 on reform, we will revisit the issue of inappropriate training for the regional job market. In Figure 1.4, we see the distribution of students by broad disciplinary categories. Nearly two-thirds are in the humanities and social sciences, which reflects ease of entry and a reliance on Arabic, Turkish, or Persian. Given pedagogic styles and class sizes, these concentrations should not be confused with a ‘liberal arts’ education.

The experiences of Japan, Korea, and Taiwan suggest that if a country is to assimilate technology, one-third or more of its university graduates need to have studied science and engineering at the graduate level. Overall, MENA countries are far from this goal, with only 8 percent of students enrolled in engineering (Jaramillo and Melonio, 2011: 8).

Figure 1.3. Distribution of Arab Students by Level, 2008

Source: UNESCO (2009: 45, Fig. 5-4)

Figure 1.4. Distribution of Arab Students by Broad Disciplinary Categories

Source: UNESCO (2009: 44, Fig. 5-2)

The education systems of the MENA are dominated in terms of students by the public sector, the great majority of students pursue an undergraduate degree, and they avoid or cannot gain admission to the STEM disciplines. All these characteristics reflect the original mission of the education systems of the post-independence MENA: education for public employment. For some time that objective made good sense, but in the long, painful era of structural adjustment the governments of the region could not afford and did not need an expanding civil service. Nor was the timid private sector that emerged amid neoliberal reforms an aggressive employer.

The Civil Service Legacy

The Middle East shows a higher proportion of total employment in bureaucracies than any other region in the world. On average, about a third of all employment is in the public sector, where conditions are undemanding, wages relatively high, and benefits relatively good (ESCWA, 2012).

The oil-rich countries have the highest proportions of civil service employment (among nationals): 80 percent in Kuwait and 65 percent in Saudi Arabia. Egypt is about 30 percent, Lebanon 20 percent, and Morocco around 10 percent (The Economist, 2015a; World Bank, 2016; Springborg, 2018: 15–17). Elnur (1998: 323) estimates that in the 1990s about two-thirds of all Sudanese tertiary graduates joined the civil service. The outlays on civil service wages and government operations in the MENA are commensurately large.

In its direct colonization of North Africa, France severely restricted higher education and reserved the bulk of the civil service for its own citizens. In 1954, two years before achieving independence, the Moroccan administration numbered 22,000 civil servants, of whom only 2,635 were Moroccan. Of the Moroccan civil servants, 1,847 had been recruited since 1950. There were only 152 Moroccans in the cadres supérieurs (Vermeren, 2002: 2019, 303). The Moroccan Ministry of Public Works had 20,000 employees, most of whom were French on the eve of independence. The dearth of Moroccan engineers led to the founding of the Ecole Mohammadia d’Ingénieurs in 1963. In Tunisia in 1952, the civil service was about evenly split between 10,000 Tunisians and 10,000 French (Vermeren, 2002: 219, 303).

Contrast the Maghreb with Turkey, which inherited the Ottoman bureaucracy designed to run an empire. Even after triage for those who could not support the new republic, the Kemalist state did not lack for bureaucrats (Şevket Pamuk, email, December 30, 2014).

The educational sector alone is a major part of the civil service sector. In Egypt, as of 2006, there were 40,000 schools with 17 million students. Eighty-three percent of all schools were public. There were 821,000 teachers, 711,000 administrators, and 150,000 workers. It represented the biggest sector of employment outside the armed forces and over a quarter of total civil service employment (Farrag, 2010: 113; Assaad, Krafft, and Salehi-Isfahani, 2018).

The public sector is a safety net, a place to be secure rather than well-off. Work is rarely demanding, the salaries are reliable if inadequate, and the benefits package for health and retirement is decent. For women in particular the public sector is the preferred place and type of employment. Shrinkage of the civil service affects women disproportionately.

Assaad (1997) reports a moment in the 1990s when the Egyptian state tried to remove any candidate for public employment from the registry if s/he took a position in a formal private sector firm. What resulted was mass resignation of young Egyptians from these private firms.

Arab and MENA citizens will tolerate unemployment while waiting for a government job or eke by in the formal sector until the prize is available. Table 1.7 shows the strong residual preference for public employment despite poor wages and hiring freezes.

The government wage bill averages about 7 percent of GDP for middle-income countries, but in the Arab world it rises to 12 percent on average. Even more market-friendly countries, like Jordan or Morocco, exceed the average (World Bank, 2016). This use of scarce resources was and is targeted in most structural adjustment programs. After the Arab uprisings, it is estimated that Egypt cut its wage bill from over 8 percent of GDP to about 5 percent. But it was recalled that a similar effort, made in 1991, was rapidly eroded and that the wage bill crept back up (Momani, 2018).

Table 1.7. Desired Employment Sector, 2012–2013 (%)

Outlays on Tertiary Education

Table 1.8, although incomplete, highlights the impact of structural adjustment (aka, neoliberal reforms) on the higher education sector in the MENA.

Table 1.8. Index Numbers of Current Public Expenditures on Higher Education Per Capita, US Dollars, Constant Prices; 1980 = 100

I cannot explain the drop-off in Syrian per capita expenditures. The Kuwaiti decline may be explained by collapsing oil prices. The consistent message is considerable belt-tightening, and, as we shall review below, the opening of the educational sphere to private actors and investment.

In 2000, when the Arab GER hovered around 20 percent, outlays on higher education were about 1 percent of GDP on average. If by 2030 the GER rises to 40 percent, it is estimated that outlays will rise to over 3 percent of GDP (Jaramillo and Melonio, 2011: 23).

By some measures the MENA has performed very well in educational outlays and investment. If we consider spending per pupil as a proportion of GDP per capita, we find that MENA countries spend more than any other group, including OECD countries. The difference is relatively modest at the primary and lower secondary levels, but it is substantial at the upper secondary and tertiary education levels. Indeed, MENA countries spend approximately 50 percent more than the middle-income countries chosen for comparison on upper secondary education and twice as much as OECD countries on tertiary education, in terms of GDP per capita (World Bank, 2008: 108; Jaramillo and Melonio, 2011: 16; Rizk, 2016).

The focus here is on public expenditures. The high outlays in the MENA reflect the fact that public education is entirely or mostly free and covers the great majority of tertiary students. Private outlays are substantial even where higher education is nominally free. We will return to this subject in Chapter 8.

To the best of my knowledge we do not have systematic data on the costs of education, per student, in the MENA/Arab world (but see El-Araby, 2010: 1–10). Sultan Abu-Orabi (2014), secretary-general of the Association of Arab Universities, presented some very summary figures: “The cost of a university student in the Arab world is about $2,700 a year, and it might be as little as $550 in some countries. In the Gulf countries, the student’s cost is between $5,000 and $15,000.”¹⁶

ESCWA (2014: 50) provides a bit more detail for 2008–2009 on public outlays:¹⁷

•Egypt: $757 per student per annum

•Syria: $814

•Morocco: $2,748

•Tunisia: $1,948

•Saudi Arabia: $8,186

•Jordan: $763

•Lebanon: $1,635

It is such disparities that define two universes of educational development in the MENA, the oil-rich and the people-rich, with Iran, Algeria, and Iraq straddling both. The trilemma for the countries of the GCC really does not exist. Table 1.9 gives a more dynamic rendering.

Table 1.9. Government Expenditure on Education as a Percentage of GDP and as a Percentage of Total Government Expenditures, Select MENA and Other Countries, 2005–2015

There is a story attached to each country entry. Some general features are that 2005 saw further and widespread programs of structural adjustment that required reducing public expenditures. The global crisis of 2008 impacted the region, but not as severely as, say, southern Europe. The region was significantly disrupted by the Arab uprisings of 2011. Turkey’s unimpressive figures for 2005 may reflect the recent economic crisis from which it was emerging, followed by, in 2012–2015, the AKP’s return to growth and social spending.

Since 1990 Egypt has spent between 4 and 5 percent of GDP on all stages of education. The 2014 constitution commits Egypt to spending not less than 4 percent of GDP on education and not less than 1 percent of GDP on scientific research. Article 238 of the constitution stipulates that the target level should be achieved no later than 2016–2017 and that secondary education will be universal by the same year.

We see overall, with a few exceptions, that over the decade 2005–2015 spending is flat or declining. This probably reflects the structural adjustment process but not demographic change. The real numbers of students at all levels was growing in this period. The countries bucking the downward expenditure trend were Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Turkey.

Some country characteristics to keep in mind are that in Lebanon the private sector takes on at least half the total financial burden of education, hence the relatively low levels of government expenditures (see Chapter 8). The downturn in Iran was influenced by the onerous sanctions regime applied to that country prior to the nuclear agreement concluded in 2015 (and partially resumed since 2018).

The UNESCO data does not cover the major petroleum exporters, aside from Saudi Arabia and Algeria. Saudi Arabia, along with Tunisia (not an oil exporter), shows the greatest effort in public expenditures on education as a percentage of both GDP and total government outlays.

Military Outlays

We can look at allocations of the public budget as indicative of government priorities. External and internal threats to order and stability are very real in the MENA. Wars and civil wars have been frequent. Outlays to shore up national security are hard to treat as discretionary. The figures from the MENA suggest that governments value military security as much as or more (Israel, Saudi Arabia, Oman) than an educated population, or, in more transactional terms, more than their social contracts. One may gainsay such priorities as window dressing for military fat cats lining their institutional nests, but in a region as violent as the Middle East it is hard to deny that national security is always at stake. This cursory treatment of military expenditures is meant merely to put educational outlays in some budgetary perspective.

The military burden is particularly high in the Middle East. Military spending as a share of GDP, for those countries in the region for which data are available, averaged 6 percent in 2016—almost triple the global average of 2.2 percent. Oman had the highest military burden in the world at 17 percent, followed by Saudi Arabia at 10 percent (data.worldbank.org). Saudi Arabia spent $63 billion in 2016 on the military, making it in absolute terms the largest spender in the MENA and the fourth largest in the world. For a number of countries, levels of spending are in fact down as a proportion of GDP from three or four decades ago—in Egypt’s case perhaps misleadingly so.

Table 1.10. Military Expenditure by Country as a Percentage of GDP by Year

Egypt’s outlays on the military sector warrant commentary. In 2009 they stood at 2.9 percent of GDP and declined thereafter, to 1.6 percent in 2016. Yet, as Robert Springborg notes, Egypt’s military “is the largest in the MENA [setting aside Turkey, which is not technically in the MENA] and the eleventh largest globally” (2018: 51). Egypt’s military expenditures are opaque. It is not alone in that respect. At least since the Mubarak era, Egypt’s leaders have tried to hide the true weight of military expenditures on the economy, and on the social contract, by touting its myriad enterprises, which compete directly and often unfairly with the private sector, as funding expenses that would otherwise come out of the country’s operating budget. Moreover, the conventional parts of the military budget, as well as the financing of its commercial operations, are not subject to parliamentary scrutiny or any public audit. The 2014 constitution vests budgetary oversight of the military in the National Defense Council, which is chaired by the president of the republic (Springborg, 2018: 53; Sayigh, 2019).

I have reviewed military expenditures merely to point out that a shift of only 2 percent in military outlays, from 6 percent of GDP on average to 4 percent, could free up funds for investment in education, job training, and R&D that would be nearly twice current levels. It is hard to believe that national security would be significantly weakened by such a reallocation.

Most Arab states impose obligatory military service on all able-bodied males. In Egypt, for example, military service kicks in at age eighteen. It is for three years, unless one is a university graduate, when it becomes one year. The age of compulsory service, roughly eighteen to twenty-two, corresponds to the cohort on which GERs are calculated. It is also a cohort that is statistically susceptible to unemployment.

There is scant documentation on what may be a huge missed opportunity to combat youth unemployment; for example, to use military service to build skills among young conscripts. The opportunities for technical and vocational training, consonant with military duties, seem vast. The needs for skilled maintenance personnel, communications technicians, accountants, coders, and so forth are clear. It is possible that in Egypt’s sprawling complex of military enterprises, from farms to engineering firms, such training is going on, but I have seen no description of it.

Youth and Other Types of Unemployment

The crisis posed by youth unemployment, the alleged ‘job mismatch’ of the inappropriately educated (see Chapter 6) for what the market wants, and the reluctance, albeit temporary, to remain idle until the right (preferably public sector) job comes along are not unique to the MENA. As the 2011 Economist’s special report on the future of jobs notes, “Early in the millennium 35–40% of surveyed employers indicated that they had trouble finding qualified hires. The fields that had inadequate supply are all what universities purportedly produce: technicians, sales reps, skilled trades, engineers, management, ICT staff, etc” (Bishop, 2011). The MENA simply has an acute case of a widespread disease.

Table 1.11. Unemployment and Labor Participation Rates, 2009–2016, Select Countries

Combining the disciplinary choices of undergraduates, the massification of higher education, the shrinking of public employment opportunities, and the timidity of the private sector, we arrive at the dismal outcomes for youth employment, especially among women, that characterize the MENA. Unfortunately, the situation is not likely to change for the better any time soon. This means, among other things, a prolonged legitimacy crisis for incumbent regimes, during which bold measures need to be taken merely to reduce building internal pressures.

The data confirms a general pattern of exceptionally high female unemployment, low female participation in the workforce, high overall unemployment, and high male youth unemployment. A few GCC members show fairly high female participation rates and fairly low overall unemployment.

Tunisia is particularly striking. It has a deserved reputation, dating back decades, for promoting gender equality, but that has not affected its low female participation rate. Nor has its large investment in education paid off in lower overall unemployment or lower male youth unemployment. In fact, Tunisia appears to have been penalized for being a star performer in producing university graduates. It has suffered from especially high rates of educated youth unemployment. Not only does this fact signal the problems of the content of university education relative to the demand for graduates but, as well, the growing frustration among the educated unemployed (Assaad et al., 2017).

Greece shows that economic crisis can devastate labor markets despite positive achievement such as high female labor force participation. Israel and South Korea show the kinds of numbers that the MENA can only dream about.

Caution is required in assessing employment data for the GCC, including Saudi Arabia. It is not clear if the data covers the national work-force only or if it includes the expatriate workforce. The latter outnumber the former sometimes five to one and by definition are employed, otherwise they would not be granted visas to enter any GCC country. They also presumably contain a large quotient of employed females (nurses, housekeepers, clerical staff). Saudi Arabia’s official estimate of unemployment among nationals for 2017 is 12.8 percent, contrasted with the 5.7 percent in Table 1.11. The 5.7 percent figure presumably includes ex-pat employees. This means 12.8 percent is the correct figure for nationals. Importantly, native citizens of the GCC enjoy privileged access to public sector positions.

I posit that this situation of high youth unemployment, especially among the educated, has caught and held the attention of political leadership because, as 2011 showed, it is regime-threatening. But to deal with it requires policy measures that are destabilizing in their own right (see especially Chapter 6).

The Public–Private Balance in Higher Education

In 2008, 89 percent of all students were in public institutions and 11 percent were in private ones (UNESCO, 2009; Bhandari and El-Amine, 2011). If one compares public and private education in terms of institutions, the private sector is catching up fast. Public universities tend to be huge, however, with enrollments in the tens of, and sometimes hundreds of, thousands. Private enrollments lag far behind public enrollments, but there, too, the private sector is coming on fast. When I began researching this study, private enrollments stood at about 10 percent of the total. By 2017, according to Adnan Badran (2017), private enrollments had risen to 30 percent. In Jordan, where Badran was once minister of education, private tertiary education is a fairly recent phenomenon (since 1991), but growth in enrollment has been rapid. In 1999 private institutions accounted for 35 percent of total tertiary enrollment. We know that in Iran private enrollments are now over 50 percent of the total.

Private sector tertiary education, by and large, is of lower quality than that of the public sector and less selective. It is exploiting a robust market. Going back to GERs, if we take the unweighted average for the Arab world in 2015 of about 33 percent, it follows that 67 percent of the eligible cohort is not in tertiary education. Many did poorly on their high school exams and thus were rejected by their preferred public university. Again, using 2015 as our base year, in excess of 16 million Arabs were eligible to attend IHLs but were not doing so. It is the demand generated by this segment of the cohort that the private sector is trying to meet. For tuition and other fees, it will provide an education to the rejects of the public system—sometimes nothing more than undergraduate business and computer science diplomas. For the public sector, this investment-based private sector (many institutions are for-profit) is welcome as it lowers the pressure on the public sector to absorb ever more students. A direct participant in Egypt reported:

I taught in six private universities in Egypt, and I can confirm that in spite of the high potential of private universities and the opportunities they offer if well managed and closely supervised, they are for the most part investment projects that aim for profit at the end of the day regardless of the quality of the service. Like other public and private institutions, corruption and cronyism rule. (Abou Setta, 2014)

In this sense private tertiary education becomes a prop for tattered social contracts. The founding and governmental licensing of private institutions becomes a facet of crony capitalism.¹⁸

Regionalism

The Cultural Treaty concluded over half a century ago at the end of the Second World War in 1945 between the member states of the Arab League provided for the exchange of teachers and students at various levels of studies and education.¹⁹ It was a step toward promoting mobility in the Arab world. The signatory states expressed their intention to standardize their own stages of education, while maintaining the basic tenets of their national education systems (Zand and Karrar, 2010).

Creating an Arab space for higher education is a goal often invoked but toward which little progress has been made. In that respect the creation of an Arab educational space, emulating the European Union’s Bologna process, has been a failure (UNESCO, 2009, and Chapter 6). This is hardly surprising given the track record of failed regional economic integration, the existence of four failed or semifailed states since 2011, and fierce interstate rivalries involving Iranian and Saudi-backed coalitions and their more distant foreign sponsors.

A decade ago, the biggest number of non-national students were in the following countries, in order: Jordan (22,600), the UAE (19,800), Lebanon (19,600), and Egypt (12,000). Lamine (2010) expresses reservations about these figures, as not all universities in these countries responded to his questionnaires, and not all universities that responded provided complete information about the nationalities of students.

The mobility of faculty is similar, with a slight increase in favor of both Arab and non-Arab professors: 7.3 percent are from other Arab countries and 2.8 percent are non-Arabs. Saudi Arabia is the leader here (32.5 percent are Arab, non-Saudi professors and 6.2 percent are from outside the region), followed by the UAE, which has a high percentage of Arab professors (48 percent) and non-Arab professors (43 percent), compared to very low levels of Emirati professors (only 9 percent). Likewise, the distribution of students in this country is different from the pattern mentioned above: 33.8 percent of the total are Arab students and 14.4 percent are foreigners, compared to 51.8 percent Emirati students.

That situation may be changing as Arab public universities seek to recruit paying students from abroad or to lure back their own nationals from the diaspora. International rankings often emphasize diversity and internationalism among faculty and students, so the ranking game provides an added incentive. Working against this are Arab animosities and rivalries. Gulf students, for example, are discouraged from studying in Lebanon as they could be endangered by the presence of Hezbollah.

Conclusion

The MENA region is undergoing a demographic transition that has led to sharply lower fertility rates and is trending toward stable population numbers. This phenomenon has opened the possibility of a ‘demographic dividend’ whereby the cohorts of the relatively young expand in relation to dependent populations of the very young and retirees. It is only a matter of time before the growth of the older cohorts begins to raise dependency ratios once again. The MENA is already in transition and may have thirty to fifty years before the dividend evaporates.

Despite declining fertility and stabilizing populations, higher education is still a growth industry. The region’s relatively low GER of about 30 percent on average means that if the target is 40–50 percent (a number of countries are already there), as seems likely, the numbers enrolled in higher education are likely to grow significantly. One may add to this adult or continuing education to underscore that tertiary education will grow robustly for some time.

There are close to 9 million tertiary-level students today (ca. 2017). That number may grow to at least 15 million students by 2050. If average costs per student are $3,000 per annum in today’s dollars, that would mean annual outlays of $4.5 billion. The costing assumes BAU, which may not be a reasonable assumption. Disruptors are likely to compete on cost and come from the private sector (see Chapter 8 and the Conclusion).

We have an incomplete image of dropout rates and graduation rates. Fairly high rates of attrition are a worldwide phenomenon, and the MENA does not appear to perform significantly worse than other major regions. But that fact should not be cause for complacency. Dropouts are the sign of wasted resources and wasted talent. It is the less privileged who are most likely to drop out. A system ostensibly designed to promote social mobility is doing the opposite.

Growth in the numbers of those who do graduate has been feeble—under 3 percent per annum. This is another token of wasted resources and talent.

The Arab world and the MENA invest a lot in higher education in terms of shares in GDP, total government expenditures, and percentages of per capita income. The outlays have clearly not borne the fruit that might have been expected. Throughout the region, including in countries like Tunisia that have made the greatest effort, youth unemployment, especially among women, remains stubbornly high. Moreover, waves of structural adjustment, beginning in the 1970s, have put public budgets under severe pressure, and most MENA governments have had to curtail outlays on education at all levels.

This factor has opened the door to private investment in tertiary education, a domain that had been the preserve of the public sector for decades. Some countries, like Iran, have been transformed in a few decades. Others may well follow suit. At present, nearly two-thirds of eligible citizens in the Arab world are not receiving tertiary-level education. Not all of them aspire to it, but many do. This pool drives demand for private higher education.

Much of what follows in this book is focused on what is possible or likely by way of public policy change and initiatives. This chapter has outlined some of both the goals of and the constraints on public policy. The ultimate constraint, the mother of red lines, is regime survival. In that context, I have long ago ceased to heed Cassandra-like warnings that the status quo is not viable. To the contrary, the status quo and BAU usually are viable, albeit suboptimal. Failing to understand why they are viable and who their beneficiaries are will consign any advice proffered to incumbents to the back of a dusty drawer.