This week Youssef Sehab started his first university days at the Artificial Intelligence Department of the Zewail City of Science, Technology, and Innovation (ZCSTI), one of Egypt’s newer and highly reputable universities. Sehab is excited about this path of higher education that he chose and managed to access.

“I knew I wanted to study artificial intelligence; this is the future, and this is what interests me,” he said. Sehab’s high school grades would not have allowed him to go to the very few public universities in Egypt that have opened a department for artificial intelligence, however. Nor did he necessarily want to attend a public university, given his assumption that these universities “are not as well equipped as the private universities”.

 Having graduated from a private language school in Heliopolis east of Cairo, he did not wish to “move from the private, which I think is better to be honest, to the public sector.”

“If I graduate from a private school, especially one with a considerable ranking and academic network like the ZCSTI, I have a very good chance to move on and get a job out of Egypt — and this is what I want to do,” he said. If it were at a public university, however, Sehab said that he would not have as much of a chance to “get out”.

His father, Tamer Sehab, backed his choices, both of the major and of the university. He will have to pay several thousand pounds for each academic year. “This is what I have been doing since I put the kids in school. I chose a private language school because I wanted to set them out right. Today, a degree in this major from a reputable private university will certainly add to Youssef’s CV when he tries to access what is an increasingly competitive labour market,” he said.

Himself a graduate from the Architecture Department of a private university, 10 Ramadan, in the 1990s, Tamer Sehab knew that this private university had offered him a paid path into a department that his high school grades had failed to get him at a public university. “At the end of the day, my university degree got me a very decent career, and that was over 20 years ago. Today, a private university degree, especially in one of the new modern disciplines, is certainly an asset,” he said.

While exempted from the regulations of the Universities Coordination Office (UCO), both in terms of grades and geographical allocation, the Sehabs had to consider the range of universities that offer an artificial intelligence degree in Egypt. They needed to consider several factors, including the ranking of the university, which varies considerably, the tuition fees, which vary considerably too, and the geographical proximity to Heliopolis. The choice of the ZCSTI offered a good choice on some but not all criteria.

According to Mariam Sayed Mahmoud, who is starting this autumn to study financial markets and institutions at the Helwan University Faculty of Foreign Trade and Business, a public university is not always a problem. This graduate of a foreign language high school did not feel intimidated by the wider university community she is set to join, but rather was curious about opting for the wider world with whatever it has to offer.

She said that many other graduates of foreign schools have also applied to the same faculty. Her choice, she added, offered an opportunity to study something she is interested in and that could get her a decent job “in four years down the road because one has to keep an eye on the labour market, which is very dynamic.”

She said that the assumption was that as a graduate of an English school who had majored in literary subjects at high school, she could easily opt to study English at the Cairo University Faculty of Arts, for example.

“But I did not think that I needed a university degree to further my language skills,” she argued. Equally, the other option was to study cinema, “which is a passion”. However, this was also something she felt she could approach through independent studies, especially as there was a lack of clarity on what it would mean in terms of job opportunities.

On the advice of her father, a journalist, against mass communication given his assessment of declining job opportunities, the choice was made to study financial markets and institutions. “So, the choice was not at all about private versus public but about an interesting discipline and a clear projection on job opportunities,” she said.

 

CHOICES: These were also the criteria that Bahiya Wael Gamal used when she was going to university three years ago.

A graduate of a French missionary school, she wanted to major in English not French and to focus on translation rather than on art and culture for reasons related to the demands of the labour market.

“The idea of going to a private community away from the rest of the people was not something that I would ordinarily subscribe to nor that my parents would condone, but at the end of the day I had to go to a private university,” Gamal said. The determining factor was a small difference between her high school grade and that required by the UCO to attend the Alsun Faculty (languages and linguistics) at Ain Shams University in Cairo.

But three years down the road, she admits that her university life, in terms of joining activities, for example, would have been compromised if she had opted for this particular major at a public university. This would not have been because she would not have wished to break away from the foreign school community, but rather because she might not have been accommodated due to invisible lines of segregation that have been growing in some areas of education.

“It is really very sad, but this is the way it is. There is a lot of compartmentalisation now that at times is hard to break,” Gamal said. She added that with the fast-growing expansion of private schools and private universities, the intersections between those who come from the private lane and those whose path is decided by public education are becoming fewer.

“We are increasingly talking about groups of students who subscribe to different, or even very different, terms of reference and who even speak a different language, even when it is still Arabic,” she lamented.

According to education expert Mohamed Habib, the topography of the higher education system in Egypt has been “evolving” for the past two decades, with a big push for a major overhaul during the past few years.

This, he insisted, had been all but inevitable, necessary, and overdue, either because new disciplines had to be introduced or because modern ways of teaching needed to be adopted to help graduates properly set out on an advancing, highly competitive, and extremely demanding labour market.

Today, he said, there is a wide range of higher education options in the country available through 25 public universities, 27 private universities, two universities established upon agreements with foreign governments, the American University in Cairo, and the Egypt Japan University of Science and Technology.

Twelve civil universities have been launched by the state, with two more being set for launch shortly, and there are four branches of foreign universities that have been set up at the New Administrative Capital that grant degrees from a foreign university.

“President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi was of the opinion that partnering one way or another with reputable foreign universities could help with upgrading the quality of higher education in Egypt. In parallel, there has been a consolidated effort to diversify the options of higher education,” Habib said.

Previously, he said, there had been an expansion of the capacity of private universities and a dedicated attempt to modernise and upgrade public education through establishing special departments, including the successful English and French departments at the faculties of law, economics, and commerce at several universities “to meet the growing demands of the labour market from multinationals, including those operating in Egypt.”

There had also been the introduction of a credit hours system as a parallel scheme for students at many faculties at many universities. “The credit hours system was first introduced in 2005, and it has really expanded since then. It is quite popular among students, as it allows them to divide the volume of the required courses they need to pass in a way that is purposeful for them,” he said.

According to Habib, the creation of these new universities and the introduction of these new systems has helped meet a growing demand among high school graduates who were becoming unsatisfied with the majors and teaching methods of the public universities that have in many places missed the chance to modernise while the world was fast moving forward.

To give “one of many examples”, Habib compares what many public universities and what most private universities, including civil and foreign, offer students of mass communication, “which is one of the fast-changing majors, given the enormous impact of IT,” both in terms of teaching methods and sub-disciplines.

He acknowledges the fact that tuition fees, which range in the thousands of pounds, are what has made all these new avenues of higher education possible, offering students the chance to study new majors and benefit from new teaching systems. He agrees that of the overall volume of university students in Egypt, only 10 per cent so far attend the private and civil universities. Those who opt for the private-type programmes and credit hour system studying at the public universities might be around 15 to 20 per cent, still leaving close to two-thirds of university students muddling through at the public universities.

“It is very unfortunate that the public universities, which take the credit for decades of higher education in Egypt, have not moved much earlier to catch up with modernisation and to better tailor their disciplines to the new world we are living in,” he said. He added that there should be no reason why students who prefer to opt for public education, for any reason including financial, should be denied the chance and right to access better education, especially since the public universities have been allowed to expand their resources through the new systems incorporated under them.

Only days before the beginning of the new academic year on 1 October, President Al-Sisi held a meeting with Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouli and newly appointed Minister of Higher Education Ayman Ashour to review the upgrading of higher education, according to a press statement from the president’s office. Ashour himself made press statements to underline “the keen attention” of the head of the executive to promoting the expansion of the faculties of science and technology to satisfy the demands of the labour market. He said that both the private and civil universities have a crucial role to play in promoting the new disciplines.

In press statements, Mohamed Al-Khosht, acting president of Cairo University, said that starting this academic year the civil university associated with Cairo University will start teaching new disciplines including artificial intelligence, nuclear physics, and finance, political science, and economics. The president of Egypt’s oldest university, which opened in 1908 as the Egyptian University, said that within the next three years his University, both through its public division and its civil division, will provide and upgrade “300 programmes” to further incorporate the credit hours online teaching systems and widen the introduction of some new disciplines.

The objective, he said, was to allow graduates of these programmes to meet the highest standards required by the labour market.

EDUCATION MADE SIMPLE? With the growing number of universities and the expanding diversity of disciplines, Abdel-Rahman Ayman, a pharmacist turned human-resources application designer, has launched his Educately application, “which stands for education simplified”.

The application is designed to help high school graduates find their best higher education destination depending on their preferences, grades, financial capacity, and place of residence. It is only designed to work for private universities, and Ayman already works with around half of the private universities in the country. He is hoping to expand and incorporate the civil universities and eventually the public universities even as they continue to be engineered according to UCO parameters.

Having graduated as a pharmacist before launching into the world of IT, Ayman knows that “at the age of 15 or 16 when a student has to make a choice about their university subject there needs to be some sort of non-judgemental guidance.” He added that his job is a two-way street because it also allows for the new universities to become visible for students on the lookout for higher education choices.

Since it started in 2020, Educately has grown from 5,000 users to the neighbourhood of 500,000. In view of the expansion of higher education, Ayman is hoping to hit one million sooner rather than later. Allowing public like private universities to be visible through his application, Ayman said, might shed light on some unseen opportunities for students who might otherwise have to opt for high tuition choices. “I think the more students know about what the options are the better, and the more informed will be the decisions they take,” he said.

Meanwhile, he argued that bringing the public and private universities into one pool for the students could end the stigma that he knows “in the minds of some” associates private universities with students who have the money but do not have the grades that could get them through the UCO.

In reality, with the exception of some foreign universities almost every single private or civil university allows students to access faculties with lower high school grades than their counterparts at the quasi-free education system of the public universities. According to Habib, this does not amount to a violation of academic merit. He argued that the “range is usually around five per cent less to enter a private university than a public university.” Moreover, one “cannot deny that the grading system used by the high schools as it stands today is not exactly the most efficient.”

Ultimately, he added, there is an international ranking system for universities that every university, public or private, would like to secure a place on. “Even from a business point of view, every university has to keep up a certain reputation if it wishes to secure a steady flow of students.”

According to a member of the Higher Council of Private Universities, who asked for his name to be withheld, there is a huge gap between the classes available and those that are required to allow a reasonable number of students per class in order to secure a decent quality of education.

“We cannot be always complaining about the size of the classes at the universities and then start to complain when paid options are out there for those who can afford it in order to reduce the sizes of classes in free education,” he said. Moreover, in addition to the tuition grants that most of these universities offer, even on a limited scale, the banks could allow more tuition loans to help students who wish to access a “better-quality education at the private universities” to achieve their objectives.

“I think that the education is better at the private universities because we have the best professors and the best facilities and very reasonable class sizes. Just like private education is better in schools, it is also better at universities,” he said.

While acknowledging that some faculties of medicine and engineering in some of the private universities have allowed admission with seven or eight per cent less marks than their public counterparts, the test is in the quality of the final university degree, he said. “If the students are not well qualified, they will simply not pass the required tests to practise or they will not find a job.”

In reality, the graduates of private universities, including those of the faculties of medicine and engineering, have proved to be very employable inside and outside Egypt. “We have had students coming with medical and engineering degrees from universities in Russia and the former Eastern European countries where they were admitted to these faculties with lower grades at high school than their counterparts in the public education system in Egypt, and they also got employed,” he argued.

“With the expansion of the national health insurance system in Egypt, we need more doctors, even at the level of general practitioners, to cover the country with its over 100 million people and to make up for the increasing emigration among doctors,” he added. He shrugged off the concerns expressed by the Engineers and Physicians Syndicates about the quality of the education that students receive in many private universities in these two particular disciplines and insisted that “generalisation is not fair.”

Tarek Nabarawi, chair of the Engineers Syndicate, disagrees. In statements made this summer as students were being admitted to the universities, he sharply criticised the discrepancies in the admission regulations for the faculties of engineering of the public and private universities. He also criticised the level of proficiency and the skills of graduates of the faculties of engineering at the private universities that fail the academic requirement of scrutinised admission.

Meanwhile, last year, the Physicians Syndicate decided to scale up the regulations for the admission of graduates of medicine from private universities inside and outside Egypt. A key point in the new regulations is the high school admission grade of the universities concerned. Graduates of any university that allows admission at a grade five per cent lower than those agreed at the public universities will not be eligible to practise medicine in Egypt.

Other regulations include the scrutiny of curricula and the clinical training offered by the concerned universities in order to make sure that they meet the academic requirements agreed on by the key faculties of medicine at the reputable public universities. The syndicate has allowed the private universities a three-year grace period to regulate their academic operations in order to make sure that their graduates will be passed for practice in Egypt.

PROFESSORS SAY: Former head of the Gynaecology Department at Ain Shams University in Cairo Ahmed Rashed said that these regulations should expand to allow for the proper scrutiny of the education offered throughout the seven-year study of medicine.

Rashed is willing to tolerate admissions to faculties of medicine at private universities at lower grades than at their public counterparts. He is also willing to accept “the reality” that allows the well-off to resort to their financial privileges to compensate for poorer high school grades. These undeniable violations of the merit system and the principle of equal opportunities, he said, remain within the smallest of groups. However, what is particularly worrying for this professor who has close to 40 years of teaching at one of Egypt’s top faculties of medicine, is the teaching and grading systems at the private universities.

“What we need to be sure about is that the students who can afford the tuition fees at the private universities are neither granted easier curricula nor allowed more flexible grading rules because this would have very disturbing repercussions not just on the level of proficiency of the graduates, and consequently on the quality of the medical service they provide to patients, but also on the reputation of the practice of medicine in the country as a whole,” he said.

Moreover, he added, equal supervision needs to be imposed on the teaching of professors who work in parallel at both the public and the private universities in order to make sure that the effort they invest in teaching students benefiting from free education is not less than that invested in the private universities that pay the professors higher salaries than their public counterparts.

“In essence, education and healthcare should not be subject to the negative influences of market rules, but if we have to have these parallel education systems we need to be sure that safety regulations are firmly applied because it is one thing to show flexibility in admitting some students to the faculty of medicine and another to allow poorly educated and trained doctors to be integrated into the healthcare system, even if at the level of general practitioner,” Rashed stressed.

According to Lamia Shehata, a professor of mechanical engineering at the German University in Cairo and previously at the highly reputable Faculty of Engineering at Ain Shams University, it is the job of the National Authority for Quality Assurance and Accreditation of Education (NAQAAE) to make sure that the rules are strictly applied. In her experience at both Ain Shams and the German University, Shehata has found no discrepancies in curricula or teaching methods. But the GUC is equipped with better and more advanced teaching facilities due to its larger budget.

According to Shehata, it would be a mistake to lump all the private universities in one group. The variation is quite large, she insisted. In the case of the Faculty of Engineering at GUC, the required high school level for admission is not less than those required by either Ain Shams or Cairo University, which are considered among the country’s top faculties of engineering.

“Sometimes, we even end up getting higher grades because we select around 3,000 students out of around 20,000 applications,” Shehata said. “Needless to say, as we apply the German rules of teaching there is no room for any compromises to the academic merit system.”

Iman Ezzeddin, head of the Drama Department at the Faculty of Literature at Ain Shams, is not so sure that the strict regulations of the NAQAAE apply across the board, especially when it comes to faculties that teach humanities which are already being increasingly snubbed in the discourse of public officials.

“It is perfectly understandable that the labour market has its preferences and that these preferences influence the choices of students, but at the end of the day the humanities remain an essential part of the pursuit of knowledge because as much as a country needs high tech engineers it also needs intellectuals and thinkers,” she said.

According to Ezzeddin, the trouble is with the admissions system that turns parts of the study of the humanities to a lesser rank due to the lack of high academic requirements in some departments. “So, students need a certain grade to get admitted to the school of medicine, and they need to be, for example, graduates of French schools to be admitted to the French department, but when it comes to the departments of philosophy, history, and drama, for example, there are no particular requirements and inevitably these departments end up as the unintentional destinations of students who do not have high grades, foreign languages, or money,” she said.

Worse still is the situation of professors in this unfortunate context, as they have large classes of almost totally unmotivated students to deal with and an inadequate pay cheque at the end of the month.

The results of this sad combination, she argued, are unmotivated students and frustrated professors who are sometimes just trying to pass on very basic knowledge to their students through notes that they compose and sell to their students to memorise in order to be able to answer very basic exams.

“This deals a blow to the crucial purpose of critical thinking, which is the essence of the study of the humanities,” she lamented. It prompts “society and officials to have a low opinion of some of the most important departments of humanities that have given this country great figures like Taha Hussein and Naguib Mahfouz, among others.”

Upgrading the curricula and teaching methods in the departments of the humanities is the way forward, argued Atef Moatemed, a professor of geography at Ain Shams. Students, he said, should have a way to learn things that is stimulating in order to make sure that they are engaged in the teaching if they have ended up in a department that was not on their list of preferences.

“If the teaching is interesting and there is a roadmap on how to move from university to the workplace, then things could be more stimulating to the students,” he argued.

According to Moatemed, the innovative approach used to teaching geography at some universities has allowed students to be trained in programming the new smart technology applications that create maps for directions. This made the students more motivated and employable. He added that this was only one example that does not necessarily require a great deal of resources that can be used to make a department more appealing and fit the requirements of the labour market.

 

‘VELVET EDUCATION’: Moatemed is of the opinion that faculty and department admissions have to be linked to the labour market. “It is very frustrating for someone who has spent four years at university to get a degree that will get them nowhere,” he argued.

Consequently, it makes sense that there should be expansion in some departments and downsizing in others. “We don’t need to have a huge number of graduates from any faculty or department when we know that they will face a hard time finding a job inside or outside Egypt, given the fact that the space for employment in the Arab Gulf countries is dwindling,” he said.

No department or faculty, he added, should be allowed to turn into “a mere university degree filler. We need a new approach towards the whole process of higher education in order to make sure that students end up studying something that matches their interests and their abilities as much as it matches labour market requirements.”

According to Manal Hefni, coordinator of the postgraduate degrees programme at the Faculty of Agriculture at the public Suez Canal University, modernising the curricula and teaching methods has certainly got her Faculty a lot of attention not just at the graduate level but also at the postgraduate level. For a long time, Hefni said, the Faculty of Agriculture was not among the favourites of students pursuing higher education.

However, she said things had changed significantly as the curricula have been transformed to match advances related to issues of sustainable agriculture and water preservation. Today, the interest is moving on to postgraduate studies with special programmes for MA degrees in materials related to climate change and sustainable agriculture. “Our students know that when they are admitted to our department, they are up for some stimulating programmes and are sure to find their way into the labour market both in Egypt and overseas,” Hefni said.

However, according to Qadri Douma, a professor in the Department of Arabic Literature at Cairo University, there are no signs on the part of any of the concerned parties to take this path further. He said that while there might be an attempt here or there to modernise, nobody seems committed to introducing total innovation, especially in the study of the humanities. He argued that the focus now seems to be to introduce a process of “soft transition” by which free education will eventually decline significantly and be confined to departments and faculties that seem to be left behind and looked down upon.

“I am afraid that in 20 years from now the free education system will be seeing its last hours because even within the public universities the shift is now towards the credit hours system that requires some fees. This is not just in the faculties of languages or humanities, but also in medicine and engineering,” Douma said.

The outcome, he added, will be university degrees at grades A, B, and C. Given that some of the humanities will continue to be unattractive and poorly connected to the labour market, these will firmly fall into the C category for students who will not be able to afford the private universities’ fees or the tuition fees for the credit hours system.

“Graduates of the credit hours system are already getting more openings in the labour market, and this means that parents will have to find a way to put their children in these systems even when they have decent high school grades. This is a very unfortunate scenario for a country that used until a few decades ago to take pride in having an affordable and decent education system that gave the Arab world some of its best doctors, engineers, teachers and intellectuals,” Douma lamented.

Both Douma and Ezzeddin shared their concerns over the parallel decline of the concept of equality, especially in education, that is enshrined in the constitution and of the merit system that used to give the Egyptian higher education regime its reputation. Social cohesion is being damaged by the creation of parallel systems of education that segregate the population according to their financial means.

According to senior researcher at the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies Hanaa Ebeid, this is precisely what could hamper the overarching target of human development in Egypt. According to Ebeid, Egypt has been moving forward in terms of increasing the share that every individual gets of GDP. But this progress, she added, is still not reflected in equal chances for education.

“It is an established fact that people who feel discriminated against tend to make some very poorly calculated decisions whose negative influence goes beyond the individual to the wider society,” Ebeid said. She argued that if, for example, the government wishes to move forward with serious development concerns like population growth in a way that is compatible with resources, then it needs to have all citizens on board. For this to happen, she added, the state needs to reduce the sense of inequality that some citizens might suffer from.

“Education is key here, given its crucial role in securing social mobility,” Ebeid stated. She stressed that social research shows that opting for “velvet education” instead risks breaking the ladder towards social mobility. This, she added, is what causes “broken ladder” syndrome.

In a recent paper, Injy Mohamed, a senior researcher at the National Centre for Social and Criminology Research, argued that the state needs to help citizens overcome difficulties on their educational path. Those whose chances are hindered to access decent education are unlikely to access decent job opportunities and will eventually end up “inheriting their parents’ poverty”, she said.

Better economic standards and better social services are among the key objectives the state has enshrined in its 2030 Vision, which is compatible with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Both Ebeid and Mohamed insist that without affordable and good quality education for all, it will be close to impossible for the state to achieve its 2030 Vision.

Moreover, Mohamed argued that human resources have proven again and again to be one of the country’s top assets, and this makes every investment in education an investment that is worthwhile. According to government figures, the remittances of Egyptians working abroad have topped every other source of foreign currency for years. In July this year, these remittances went over $29 billion, while the revenues of the Suez Canal, which also hit a record high, secured the country $7 billion.

According to Article 19 of the 2014 constitution, “every citizen has the right to education”. The same article stipulates that the state needs to allocate no less than four per cent of GDP to the education budget. According to research conducted by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), a NGO, the state still has work to do to fully honour this commitment. For the year 2021-22, EIPR researchers found that overall state spending on education did not even reach the three per cent line.

However, according to prominent education expert Ragui Assaad, free education is not always the answer. In a recent paper entitled “Egypt’s ‘Free’ Higher Education Policy Breeds Inequality of Opportunity,” Assaad argued that “correcting the severe misallocation of public resources within higher education can be achieved by abandoning the principle of free higher education for all in favour of policy options that allow public universities to charge tuition and fees and that use available public resources to provide subsidies targeted to the most deserving social groups.”

Assaad said that this could allow a more equitable access to higher education as it could allow for the expansion of the universities to allow more room for more students.

According to Habib, it is not hard to notice that the percentage of students attending private schools is quite compatible with those attending private universities. Consequently, he added, every expansion in private schooling, “which is happening as more and more parents are choosing to invest in their children’s education to make sure that they have the foreign languages and soft skills required for the labour market,” will be matched with private university education.

The expansion of private university education, he added, should not be seen as an inevitable sign of the demise of public education. “Rather the opposite is the case: it could be a chance to reduce the pressure on public universities in view of their complaints about limited resources,” he said.

“The question then becomes whether the public universities are able to put in the necessary effort to improve the quality of the education they are offering, because ultimately higher education is not just about a university degree but is also about quality.”

*A version of this article appears in print in the 6 October, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.