Youth in the Middle East have been urging to revolutionize higher education. The complaints comprise of various political interference, overpopulated classrooms, disorganised and passive administration, diminishing of quality at multiple levels, an irrelevant curriculum, under-qualified professors and particularly, graduate unemployment. However, most of these demands are hard to satisfy.
The crisis of Middle East higher education is inherent and requires a revision of the national higher education strategy. The amount of resources, human and financial that are currently needed cannot be fulfilled within a short period of time. Some of the key issues include the inevitable massification of higher education which saw a significant number of youth enrollment into universities. However, this sudden higher education expansion has outdone the capacity of the economy to provide jobs to graduates. Thus, governments have provided more incentives to keep young people in universities rather than being unemployed. Further, the decline in average quality of higher education in the mass system meant that students face an issue of overcrowding, and educators do not have more than bachelor’s degrees.
Unfortunately, transformation is difficult and needs both resources as well as a guideline. Neither of these policies can be put in place effortlessly and the design of sound higher education policy with the Middle East region is hard to realise.
Join us in the upcoming QS-MAPLE 2019 from 25-27 February 2019 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia as we discuss the topic on “Research in the Middle East and Africa: Overcoming the Barriers”.