Landscape of Higher Education in the Arab World: Quality, Relevance, and Student Mobility

Abstract

The university is deemed to be the center of knowledge and an incubator constructing human capital to deliver the vehicles of development, entrepreneurs, and R&D in terms of quality and relevance, releasing its outputs to the benefit of business in the market place as well as the general economy.

Nonetheless, the typical university in the Arab Region lacks autonomy and does not enjoy full governance and sustainable resources. Arab universities are politically structured as rigid entities and centrally controlled by governments through their ministries of higher education. As a result, Arab universities lost the mobility and the flexibility needed for innovation and creative thinking and have evolved into heavily bureaucratic institutions. They lost competitiveness and became a copy of one another, i.e. clones.

Reforms are badly needed to decentralize the higher-education system toward full autonomy and governance, so as to act independently on curricula, programs, admission policies, tuition, and full freedom of thought, expression, and decision making, thereby creating an inducive environment for enquiry and the quest for excellence in teaching, learning and research, and creating and disseminating knowledge.

The typical Arab university lacks an outreach program and lacks bridging with industry and other competitive institutions abroad.

In short, higher education in the Arab Region has expanded in the quantity of more traditional institutions, but not in quality and relevance. Reforms are badly needed.