Classifying Higher Education in the Middle East and North Africa

New Study Provides Standardized Framework for Understanding Higher Education Institutions in the Middle East. IIE’s groundbreaking study provides baseline for improving quality of higher education in the Middle East and North Africa region.
A new report released by the Institute of International Education (IIE) lays the groundwork for a new classification model for higher education institutions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region countries. The report, "Classifying Higher Education Institutions in the Middle East and North Africa: A Pilot Study," was produced by IIE with support from Carnegie Corporation of New York and in partnership with the Lebanese Association of Educational Studies (LAES) in Beirut.
While the number of global and country-level ranking and classification systems continues to increase, a regional classification of higher education institutions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has not been developed. Such a system is particularly needed given the rapid expansion of the higher education sector in the region, as new domestic institutions and branch campuses of overseas institutions emerge and as developments associated with the Arab Spring lead to changes in the governance system of higher education, resulting in the potential for greater international collaboration and educational reform.
"There is no standardized framework for understanding the region's institutions," said Rajika Bhandari, deputy vice president of research and evaluation at the Institute of International Education and the lead researcher for the study. "Having more comparable information such as that provided by our study will lead to a deeper and more transparent understanding of the wide range of institutions in the Arab world and how best to engage with them at a national, regional and global level."
The pilot study, which was initiated in May 2009, surveyed over 300 higher education institutions in seven pilot countries: Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates. Egypt was originally included in the study but data was ultimately not available due to the political events unfolding there. The findings from the report were first presented at the 3rd World Innovation Summit on Education in Doha earlier this month. “Many higher education systems in the region are undergoing a transition from old systems to new,” said Adnan El Amine, co-author of the report, and a founding member of the Lebanese Association for Education Studies. "Overall, Arab institutions' involvement at the international level is relatively low. Yet there is a critical need for institutions of the region to engage with those outside, especially as they rebuild their societies after the recent political events and begin to engage a newly mobilized youth population."
The IIE study resulted in a comprehensive classification model—the Classification Model for the Arab Countries (CMAC)—comprised of 77 key institutional and research indicators that fall within the following 11 dimensions: institutional characteristics; teaching and learning profile; curriculum; student profile; faculty profile; financial profile; research involvement; cultural orientation; religious orientation; regional engagement; and international engagement.
The goals of this new classification model are to:
- Help strengthen MENA institutions locally by providing benchmarks and key indicators on which institutions can measure and track their growth and compare themselves to similar institutions.
- Generate international interest in the region’s institutions, leading to deeper linkages between MENA HEIs and other institutions around the world to facilitate knowledge sharing, research collaboration, and institutional capacity building.
- Provide critical institutional-level information and data that prospective students from the MENA region or from other parts of the world can use to select a higher education institution.
The online report is available for purchase at IIE publications and reports, where you can also download the executive summary for free.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
While the number of global and country-level ranking and classification systems continues to expand, a regional classification and assessment of higher education institutions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has not been developed. Such a system is particularly needed given the rapid expansion of the higher education sector in the region, as new domestic institutions and branch campuses of overseas institutions emerge. As a result, higher education in the Arab countries nowadays is complex and takes disparate forms. Such a situation leads to some confusion in the ranks of Arab educators themselves, as well as among international observers, particularly in terms of meanings and equivalences.
From an international perspective, the varying nature of higher education institutions and degrees in the region has consequences for the way international agencies and higher education institutions can relate to credentials issued in the Arab countries. This is a challenging issue particularly as students’ mobility from Arab countries towards the U.S. and other OECD countries has taken a significant leap in recent years. According to the Institute of International Education’s Open Doors report, out of a world total of 723,277 foreign students in the USA in 2010/11, 47,963 or seven percent were from the MENA region, an increase of 24 percent over the previous year. In the meantime, classification of higher education institutions is becoming an international necessity, either within a specific country (for example, the Carnegie classification in the U.S., and the UK typology), or within a whole region (the European classification, for example).
The lack of an Arab regional classification or common framework has implications for all of the following stakeholders:
- At the research level: Due to a lack of an empirically developed classification of HEIs, researchers and research agencies are likely to work with an arbitrary selection of higher education institutions in the Arab region, resulting in inconsistent or conflicting results, and unreliable or inappropriate conclusions.
- At the institutional level: The lack of a classification scheme for HEIs in the Arab region also limits the prospects of networking, exchange, mobility and cooperation between institutions, in the region and abroad, of similar profiles and characteristics.
- At the selection level: The paucity of information on HEIs and their lack of accessibility limits the ability of students and the public to make better informed choices regarding their selection of fields of study and subsequent careers.
- At the policymaking level: The lack of precise data on classified higher educational institutions in the Arab region sometimes misleads policymakers and frustrates initiatives for possible cooperation among institutions, regionally and internationally, and creates confusion regarding: transferability of students, faculty mobility, and the establishment of quality standards and regional frameworks for quality assurance.
- At the industry level: The current lack of a classification scheme for HEIs in the Arab region also results in insufficient research funding from the industry and the lack of university-industry partnerships. Without a clear understanding of different types of institutions and their features, HEIs are often mischaracterized and the distinction between research-oriented and teaching-oriented institutions is not always evident.
All this makes the establishment of a classification system for higher education in the Arab countries more urgent.
Recommendations for the Future
Higher education in the MENA region is undergoing a period of rapid change and expansion. Our study and the resulting classification provide the groundwork for further research on developing a common framework that enables a better understanding of the institutions in the region.
The data gathered through our pilot study can be used to conduct in-depth country-level analysis. The data can also be used to further study differences across sub-regions within the larger Arab region. The CMAC assumes certain commonalities and similarities (while accounting of key differences by sector and other criteria), however there is scope to further analyze any sub-regional trends that exist. The data can also be used by HEIs to benchmark themselves within the country and the region.
Finally, although rankings were not the goal of our study, it is conceivable that data from the study can be used to generate rankings of HEIs in the seven pilot countries, especially on the dimensions for which there is more complete and reliable data. This next step would require relative weighting of various indicators, a task that we did not undertake in our analysis as our goal was to present the data in a descriptive way rather than to rank institutions.
In conclusion, it is clear that to develop a comprehensive classification—with more complete information and that could be scaled up to apply to all countries in the region—more time and effort is needed to mobilize countries, ministers, and institutions in the MENA region regarding the importance of gathering high-quality institutional data and of participating in the classifications initiative. Local and regional buy-in is essential or else there is little motivation for governments and institutions to participate and the initiative is viewed as being externally imposed.
One step to mobilize the higher education sector in the region is to share findings from this pilot study at key events in the region with the goal of engaging representatives of the Arab countries that have participated fully in the study as well as representatives of other developing and non-Western countries that have invested in developing classification systems for their higher education sector. One example of this was a highly successful workshop at the recent 2011 WISE conference in Doha, Qatar. The session was attended by over 60 participants from several different countries. There are many good examples from Latin America, Asia, and the former Soviet states of how to develop a shared set of criteria against which to benchmark or compare HEIs, and of how to use this type of institutional data for improving the quality of higher education. Ministers of higher education from the target MENA countries can learn first-hand through the best practices of these other countries that transparency of higher education systems is critical to increasing the quality of higher education in the region, similar to what China set out to do through the Shanghai rankings (now called the Academic Ranking of World Universities or ARWU) which were originally conceived of as a way to improve the quality of Chinese institutions and to position them as world-class.
A current report on higher education in the Arab world would be incomplete without acknowledging the widespread political upheaval in the region and the potential impact of the “Arab Spring” on universities of the region as they reshape themselves to educate a newly mobilized youth population whose understanding of their political, economic and social reality has changed dramatically. What role universities will play in preparing future leaders and the workforce of tomorrow in the region remains to be seen, but it heightens the need, at the most fundamental level, for solid institutional data and information.
The project directors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of participating HEIs and ministries in the MENA region, as well as individual research coordinators in each country, and the overarching support of Carnegie Corporation, without which the project would not have been possible.
See also Lifelong learning as a key to social transformation and education in the Middle East and North Africa, More funding for better education in the Middle East and North Africa analyze the World Bank and the French Development Agency.