The rapid expansion of universities in Africa has damaged teaching quality and undermined research activity, the World Bank has warned. In a hard-hitting report, the bank sets out the problems afflicting higher education in sub-Saharan Africa.
Although funding for the region’s universities is relatively high in terms of international standards as a proportion of gross domestic product, the investment is poorly focused, the report says. Money has not gone to the most-needed disciplines, nor has it adequately supported research as governments have struggled to cope with soaring enrollments. “Too rapid an increase in enrollments has eroded quality and is undermining the contribution of tertiary education to growth,” the report says.
Between 1991 and 2005, enrollments tripled with average annual growth of 8.7 percent. However, between 1980 and 2005, annual public funding fell from an average of $6,800 (Rs.3.25 lakh) per student to $981 (Rs.47,000) in 33 low-income African countries.
This, the report says, led to a drop in the standard of education at a time when the sector was also being damaged by uneven attention to quality assurance, the needs of industry and by governance problems. “Rapid expansion channeled students disproportionately into less expensive ‘soft’ disciplines and siphoned off research funding to cover the costs of more students. In 2004, just 28 percent of students were enrolled in science and technology fields, and research output faded as Africa devoted just 0.3 percent of GDP to it,” the study says.
As a result, the number of postgraduate students fell, stunting the next generation of Africa’s academics. Meanwhile, the poor-quality graduates that universities were producing led to a soaring graduate unemployment rate which currently exceeds 20 percent in nine of the 23 countries that supplied data.
The “crisis” in academic staffing has been compounded, the World Bank says, by low salaries, declining staff-to-student ratios and a brain drain that has resulted in vacancy rates for university posts running at 25 to 50 percent. In this environment, the private sector has boomed, with the number of private higher education institutions growing from handful to almost 500 since 1990.
To address these problems, the World Bank says a proper debate on public financing of reforms is needed. “The focus should be on using existing resources more efficiently,” it says. “Institutions need to consciously transform themselves into a different type of educational enterprises: networked, differentiated and responsive institutions focused on the production of strategically needed human skills and problem-solving research.”
Adds Obiageli Ezekwesili, the World Bank’s vice president for the Africa region: “Even though social and political demand calls for ever-increasing enrollment rates in colleges and universities, these must be balanced against the need to raise the quality and relevance of education and research. Governments must develop strategies to produce graduates to lift their economies out of poverty. This is not just the remit of education ministries, it begins with finance ministers.”
(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education Supplement)