Opportunity turned into threat

Dissatisfaction with the higher education sector in the Kingdom is on the rise.

Criticism is levelled at it by both key players within the sector and by others outside it. Much of the dissatisfaction and criticism is justified.

Once a beacon, both nationally and regionally, the sector is fast losing its vigour and edge.

Its performance is largely inefficient, often mediocre, and there is a clear mismatch between its output, with respect to both human resources and research, and the actual needs of society.

It has also failed to address effectively the major challenges facing it, and has lost much of its direction and sense of purpose.

People cite many causes for the “crisis” the sector is currently experiencing: infrastructural, fiscal, pedagogical, managerial, legislative, cultural, etc. The causes are indeed numerous.

One of the most important, obvious and often ignored is the sector’s rapid quantitative expansion. This, in my view, is the root cause of many of the mishaps that hit the sector over the years, grew and become chronic.

The sector started in 1962 with one public university, 69 students and a handful of faculty members. 

At this point in time, it has close to 30 public and private universities, about 280,000 students, and nearly 9,000 faculty members. Quite a leap.

The problem with this leap is that it was neither carefully planned nor carefully executed. For most, it is not even desirable.

Nearly all our universities found themselves forced to expand out of a dire need to survive and an urge to make ends meet. Mission accomplished.

Our public, i.e., “governmental”, universities are not much supported by the government. The government pledges on average less than 10 per cent of their budgets, and what it pledges to some often fails to arrive.

Left to fend for themselves, universities generate funds almost exclusively from students’ fees. To get more fees, they admit more students. This is the formula, pure and simple.

The private universities are run by investment companies for profit. To cover expenses and to make profit, they also try to admit as many students as possible, normally those who would not be admitted to the specialisations they want at public universities, which are significantly less costly than private universities.

Here is where the vicious cycle begins.

Admitting more students generally means large classes, teacher-centred settings, compromised class management, resort to lecturing and rote learning, heavy pressure on learning facilities, exam-based assessment and mass education.

It also generally means hiring professors en masse, often with minimum qualifications and without much competition.

And it means heavy loads for professors: teaching and advising many students, grading many papers and exams, and handling much paper and committee work.

Overall, professors cannot engage students well, cannot give them the attention they need, cannot provide them with thorough feedback on assignments, cannot interact with them well, and cannot do the kind of research required from them.

While nearly all reputable universities in the world accept students through a meticulous process that gives attention to students as individuals (recommendation letters, essay writing, CVs, interviews, etc.), ours accept them “blindly”, based on a single grade average at the end of high school.

This happens partly because this is the way it is, but mainly because our universities want to fill the slots they have.

Students get accepted en masse and graduate en masse.

Seeking more students also means teaching subjects and specialisations that attract students, not necessarily those that are good for them or necessary for society.

This is a killer for our universities.

Originally, our public universities were established with the intention to serve different functions, some stressing liberal education (i.e., universities of Jordan and Yarmouk), military sciences (Mutah), technical/technological education (JUST, Applied University, Tafileh), some promoting a moderate image of Islam (Al Al-Bayt), etc.

Due to the race to get more students, they all started offering the limited range of specialisations that students find attractive: medicine, engineering, business, dentistry, pharmacy, languages, etc. 

As a result, and over time, universities lost their original missions and became copies of each other. And their output has become largely similar and irrelevant.

At this point in time, for example, they are all opening or trying to open medical programmes because they are most lucrative, fee wise.

The drive for student bulk and for fees has also brought about admission into the “parallel” programme, which originally started at one university and was then quickly adopted by all.

Under this “crooked” admission channel, which all in the sector hate but find necessary, students with lesser grades get admitted but they pay more money than their peers.

This has the double pernicious effect of depriving many deserving students of admission and opening the doors wide to low achievers.

The pursuit of quantity has, of course, destroyed campus life. 

Most of our universities have been built to accommodate one-third of the student and faculty body they currently house. As a result, the campuses are heavily congested. Visit any one campus and you think you are in downtown Amman at peak hour or on Rainbow Street Thursday night.

This creates an unhealthy environment for interaction and is one major cause for campus violence.

More could be said about this undesirable quantitative drive, which has created a mess at our campuses.

The first casualty of it — in addition to the students and faculty members — is quality.

Unfortunately, and as things stand, the quantity drive has affected negatively quality of learning, of students’ skills, of professors’ research, etc.

The high demand for education in our society, which many universities in many parts of the world would find an opportunity and a blessing, has become a threat and a curse.

Rather than giving our universities the opportunity to select when admitting students and focus on quality programmes that are relevant to students’ and society’s actual needs, it has pushed them to simply open the doors wide open to a set of similar programmes in order to earn the funds they need for sustenance.

Unless our universities, and those in charge of the sector, come up with smart solutions to deal with financial needs and the quantity challenge, the overall situation in the sector will continue to deteriorate.

This, of course, is only one problem in the education sector. There are many others, equally damaging.