Business owners in Jordan are lamenting the lack of qualified Jordanian graduates, while officials claim that Jordanian degrees are among the best in the Arab world. Wajih Halawa investigates.
The Jordanian higher education system has undoubtedly come a long way from the 2,000 students it served beginning in the late 1960s. Today, there are over 200,000 Jordanian and foreign students enrolled in a total of 61 public and private universities and colleges from the north to the south of the Kingdom.
At first glance, the sector shows that it has plenty going for it. Jordanian universities have good showings in terms of overall quality, making them popular with both local and overseas students. The Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research's (MoHE) requirements have remained stable over the years, and has set stringent standards for equating degrees from other countries with those of Jordanian universities. Several Jordanian institutions, like Jordan University for Science and Technology (JUST), Princess Sumaya University for Technology (PSUT), Al-Quds College, and the University of Jordan (U of J) are establishing solid reputations for quality graduates that are employable and trainable. But the preparedness of Jordanian graduates for the job market is still up for contention. Several employers told Jordan Business that they do not feel universities are training students to be critical thinkers capable of effective communication and innovation in a new economy that prizes individual excellence.
Beyond mere academic and practical training and research, employers are mostly complaining of job applicants with little to no English skills, poor written and spoken communication abilities reflected during interviews, a lack of professional ethics and conduct, and the inability to work in a team environment.
Conversely, academics and business owners are seeing a lack of motivation and initiative on the part of students. Every end of summer sees prospective undergraduates flocking to the academic program of fashion for the season in the 1980s it was civil engineering, in 2000 it was information technology, and now it seems to be graphic design going by what's popular rather than what they really want to succeed in.
Making matters worse, some students think they can leverage family connections and tribal affiliations to get that final passing grade in order to graduate and in many cases they do, according to several professors we spoke to who wished to remain anonymous. The blame, they say, is not entirely due to the educational institutions. "Our school culture is generating students who have little respect for the pursuit of knowledge," said Dr. Hisham Ghassib, president of PSUT.
Hind Othman, director of human resources and the specialized training center at Al-Quds College, told Jordan Business that some of higher education's problems lie with the students themselves. "Whenever I ask students where they are heading, what their ambitions are, and what they are looking for, they are never able to give me answers," she said.
Is anyone learning anything here?
The problems of the higher education sector are shaking the confidence of many business leaders in the quality of our graduates. For starters, students are obsessed with their high school Tawjihi exam results, which form a poor basis for admissions. Students complain that professors are incapable as educators, and many subjects at Jordanian universities are still being taught in Arabic, even topics like marketing that by default incorporate an international view. Student-faculty ratios in some universities are nearly 35:1 in some cases, affecting the quality of higher education to a great extent.
Minister of Education and Higher Education Khaled Toukan is one of Jordan's longest serving ministers over several successive cabinets. The MIT-trained professor of nuclear physics spoke frankly to Jordan Business about the problems of the higher education sector.
The first issue is financing, whether from the government for public universities (which increased by five institutions in the 1990s alone), or from investors for private universities. Currently, the government is only able to supply 25% of the JD250 million budget proposed by the 10 public universities. Public universities are indebted with JD135 million including interest, according to Dr. Toukan. Much of this debt has evolved from building infrastructure and facilities examples include the King Abdullah I Hospital at JUST, and the JD30 million Al Hussein bin Talal University in Maan which he says were necessary. "There may be some waste here and there," he admitted, "but this would not account for more than 5% of the budget."
Dr. Toukan, however, insists that the humble amounts spent by the government are expended efficiently, and the result is a standard of higher education that exceeds surrounding countries, especially in the Arabian Gulf, where spending per student by Gulf governments is more than 10 times the amount spent by the Jordanian government.
The second major threat, according to Dr. Toukan, has been the exponential increase in students entering the university system and overloading its already limited resources, particularly under the parallel and evening programs. The parallel program, for example, has allowed students to pay their way into academic majors that they normally could not enter due to their Tawjihi grades. "This was a compromise on quality, accepting students with lower grades," explained Dr. Toukan. "And this was at the expense of faculty members, who were teaching most of the time with no opportunities for conducting research and developing themselves professionally."
The quality of private universities
Since the first privately-owned Jordanian university opened its doors in 1990, higher education has become big business, with private universities and colleges now exceeding 15. Theoretically, privately-owned universities were supposed to offer new opportunities for students who could not enter their programs of choice in public universities.
Instead, as employers complain about the quality of Jordanian graduates and the lack of applied higher education, questions are arising about profiteering on the part of investors. One is left wondering why the private education system in Jordan is primarily profit-based, whereas many of the West's private universities and colleges are not for profit institutions that are vested in their communities through significant philanthropic involvement.
"The issue of profiteering is a real concern," noted Dr. Toukan. "Private universities in Jordan have not yet established a culture of excellence and distinction, as well as original scientific research. In some cases, it is a matter of simply taking in students and graduating them, probably with average standards."
Dr. Ghassib of PSUT is equally concerned about this phenomenon: "If education is to become a business, and a respectable one that competes locally and internationally, then you need proper quality control to protect students as well as the universities and colleges themselves." If the private sector wants to make demands of the educational sector, Dr. Ghassib notes, then it must be enabled to make significant contributions to support the country's universities. This means supporting capital expenditure and infrastructure at Jordanian universities, funding scholarships and research grants, and enabling these institutions to produce highly qualified graduates.
Measuring proficiency
This year, MoHE implemented a new University Achievement Exam, a series of tests in major fields aimed at measuring the proficiency of Jordanian graduates. "We are focusing on quality," said Dr. Toukan of the testing scheme, "establishing our national measures to match international standards of quality and relevance and exposure to outside cultures and influences...our system should produce graduates who can compete on equal footing with any others around the world." After some critics assumed that the exam was prepared by ministry officials and professors of general disciplines, fears were alleviated as MoHE presented the University Achievement Exam as an international standardized test administered by over 6,000 universities and colleges across the world.
The results of the first University Achievement Exam are already in, but trends and rankings will not be clear for at least another year or two, since the exam was offered overwhelmingly by state universities, with minimal participation from private ones. Eventually, every Jordanian graduate will need to sit for the exam, and it will even be required of students who obtain their degrees abroad.
New strategies
In order to improve funding for higher education, Dr. Toukan has worked with the Ministry of Finance to reactivate the long-dormant 1% university tax, which should generate JD15 to 20 million per year towards reducing public university debt. The minister is also spearheading an aggressive reform effort in the education sector, which includes a broad five-year strategy. Among its many recommendations, the strategy aims to rethink admissions criteria by reducing the emphasis on the Tawjihi average, introduce standardized testing for admissions and graduation, and reduce the number of colleges by introducing the polytechnic format. One community college that might provide a good template for this last approach is Al-Quds College, founded in the early 1980s. Now counting 2,400 students, Al-Quds College has aggressively cast itself as an ideal center for training and continuing education in highly practical fields, especially graphic design, photography, electronics, and business management.
Mrs. Othman of Al-Quds College credits the progress of the institution to what she sees as added care to quality of infrastructure and facilities, trainers and instructors, and new programs that are relevant to the needs of students according to new teaching techniques. She also noted that the role of the community college in society, offering continuing education programs in new fields, is underrated.
Solving the problem
Generally speaking, Jordanian education has potential for an outstanding offering, if proper reforms are carried out. A United Nations Development Program (UNDP) report assessing the gaps between skills acquired in higher education and the needs of the Jordanian labor market, released last March, noted the lack of systematic employment services and job tracing information at Jordanian universities. The report recommended the establishment of labor monitoring units to forecast trends in the labor market, implementing Employment Support Services (ESS) as an institutionalized function at universities, and providing guidance for employers offering On the Job Training (OJT) for students.
© Jordan Business 2006
