Dr. Iyad Abu-Jeib's Page about Education in Palestine and the Arab World

Dr. Iyad Abu-Jeib's Page about Higher Education in the Arab World

September 2016

1.جامعة بيرزيت هي الأولى فلسطينيا في تصنيفيين عالميين أحدهما تصنيف نت والاخر تصنيف أكاديمي.

2. حنى في تصنيف النت الاخر (وهو ليس تصنيفا أكاديميا) الدي تحتل فيه جامعة النجاح المرتبة الاولى فان جامعة بيرزيت تحتل المرتبة الاولى فلسطينيا (أي تسبق جامعة النجاح) في الجانب المتعلق بالأبحاث العلمية في هدا التصنيف.

3. تحتل جامعة بيرزيت المرتبة الاولى في عدد الأبحاث العلمية التي تلتقطها جوجل وفي عدد الاقتباسات العلمية وتأثيرها.

4. في أكثر التصنيفات الأكاديمية شهرة لا توجد الا عدة جامعات عربية من أفضل 500 جامعه بالعالم وكلها سعودية ولا توجد أي جامعة من أي دولة عربية أخرى.

بالمناسبة حسب اعتقادي أن من نهض بجامعة بيرزيت (أقدم جامعة فلسطينبة) وعملها عريقة هما جابي برامكي وألبرت أغازريان.

أيضا الجامعة الأمريكية ببيروت والجامعة الأمريكية بالقاهرة تعتيران من أعرق الجامعات العربية وهما جامعتا نخبة عدد طلابهما قليل وخرجتا شخصيات سياسية وعلمية مهمة على مستوى العلم من ضمنهم وزراء و رؤساء حكومات وقادة دول من ملوك و رؤساء وغيرهم الكثير الكثير.

Here are some facts about AUB (American University of Beirut) and AUC (American University in Cairo. See their noticeable alumni (from the Palestinians and others), their accreditations, and their rankings.

First about AUB.

1)      It has students from more than 18 nationalities. Most students are Lebanese, then the second on the list are Americans and third on the list are Palestinians. It has two schools.
2)      The University for about 14 years or more was accepting almost the same number of students with a little decrease or increase from one year to another. The number of students increased only by about 1700 students in 14 years. Of course, there is an explanation of having a steady and slow increase instead of having big jumps.
3)      The following statements from AUB brought my attention
a)      Create custom research plans and processes to enhance AUB's ability in achieving its enrollment goal.
b)      Create means to increase the pool of applicants.
c)      Create a comprehensive enrollment management plan which facilitates inter-unit cooperation and ensure better alignment of admissions criteria and enrollment management procedures with institutional mission.
d)      Develop short and long term enrollment projection, school record evaluation, admission scores and thresholds.
e)      Model financial aid in order to calibrate admission yield and forecast demand for seats.
f)      The University encourages freedom of thought and expression and seeks to graduate men and women committed to creative and critical thinking, life-long learning, personal integrity, civic responsibility, and leadership.
g)      The University, which was granted institutional accreditation in June 2004 by the Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools in the United States and reaffirmed in 2016.
h)      The QS World University Rankings for the year 2016/2017 show progress on AUB's overall ranking amongst universities worldwide with an increase of 40 positions or spots.
i)      The Daily Star reports on the Quacquarelli Symonds World University Ranking report that placed AUB at 228.

4)      AUB has a weekly newsletter and a wonderful magazine.
5)      AUB has a good campus map.
6)      The teaching load in mathematics is five courses per year.
7)      The Department of Mathematics has 120 students and 17 faculty members.
8)      The Department of Mathematics usually participates in AMS-MAA joint meetings in the US.
9)      There is useful information about its accreditation, international ranking, and Board of Trustees on Wikipedia. Among those on the Board of Trustees billionaires and two former prime ministers.
10)     Among its graduates, the President of Afghanistan, the President of the Maldives, Vice President of the University of Ottawa, Abdelhamid Shoman, Hanan Ashrawi, Gabi Paramki, Haider Abdel Shafi, Salam Fayyad, George Habash, Khalil Alhindi, Hanna Naser, Ahmad Shuqairi, Ibrahim Tuqan, Lyla Khaled, Zaha Hadid, many former or current presidents, prime ministers, university presidents, ministers, ambassadors, mayors of many countries.
11)     The following is taken from Wikipedia

The American University of Beirut (AUB); Arabic: الجامعة الأميركية في بيروت‎‎)[3] is a private, secular and independent university in Beirut, Lebanon. Degrees awarded at the American University of Beirut (AUB)[3] are officially registered with the New York Board of Regents.
The university is ranked as the number one university in Lebanon and among the top 250 universities in the world by the QS World University Rankings.[4]

Here are a few paragraphs quoted from Wikipedia about AUC (American University in Cairo). AUC is split into 6 Schools and it's a non profit institution. Among its graduates, a former president of the Maldives, the Queen of Jordan, the Director of the CIA, and a former Japanese Defense Minister:

The AUC student body represents over 100 countries.[1] AUC's faculty members, adjunct teaching staff and visiting lecturers are internationally diverse and include academics, business professionals, diplomats, journalists, writers and others from the United States, Egypt and other countries.
AUC holds institutional accreditation from the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE) and from Egypt's National Authority for Quality Assurance and Assessment of Education (NAQAAE)
Rankings
•       AUC is ranked 345th university globally and ranked 1st in Egypt by QS World University Rankings[33]
•       Ten AUC graduate programs were ranked among the top in Africa and best 200 worldwide in Eduniversal's Best Master's Rankings for 2015 - 2016[34]
•       AUC placed 81 out of 407 institutions worldwide in the Universitas Indonesia (UI) GreenMetric World University Ranking for 2015 - 2016[35]

By the way, both AUB and AUC have small numbers of students. AUB has 8,315. From those, 6,676 are undergrads and the rest are graduate students. Of course, the University has MD and Ph.D. programs. On the other hand, AUC has 6,835 students. 5,561 of those are undergraduates and the rest are graduates. Of course, the University has Ph.D. programs. The faculty-student ration is about 12 percent. The part-time ratio to full-time is about 30 percent.

Of course, AUB (which is older) graduated more celebrities (famous, influential, successful, etc) than AUC. But, AUC has more nationalities than AUB. AUC has more than 100 nationalities while AUB has more than 18 nationalities.

Regarding the Faculty of Science, you may be surprised if you are not familiar with the two universities. AUB has a Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The science majors they have are the same as the four majors we have in addition to a computer science program which in our case belongs to the Faculty of IT & Engineering. The Faculty of Science at AUC has the four majors we have in addition to other science majors, Engineering majors and IT majors.

So, since these two universities have small numbers of students, then how do they manage to be so successful?

Is it by having high tuitions? No.

But, there is a note worth mentioning. In 2004 I think AUB had a fundraising. The target, I think, was $140 million. They collected instead $171 m.

1) Birzeit University was a few years ago #1 in Palestine in terms of citations of its scientific published papers. That implies its research had more impact than the research of any other university in Palestine. I don't know if there is a more recent study that changes this fact. You know that the number of citations determines the impact factor of journals. By the way, 13 members of the Palestinian negotiating team in the 90s were from Birzeit University. Among those (I think): Hanan Ashrawi, Reyad Almalky, Ghassan Alkhatteb, Nabeel Qassis, etc. Also, some presidents of other Palestinian universities such as Khadouri and Alquds were at Birzeit. Many Palestinian political leaders (including Marwan Barghouthi, Ibrahim Khreisheh and Fathi Shuqaqi) and resistant leaders graduated from Birzeit or taught at Birzeit. In the past, it used to have good international faculty members until they were required to sign an Israeli document. Most of them refused and left. Also, it has Helga of the DAAD foundation. I think, it still has international students and an international summer camp.

2) There is another ranking called, I think, "Global University Ranking." This ranking is done in Russia. But, a few years ago, this ranking ranked Moscow State University #5 and that was ahead of Harvard and Oxford!

3) There is a ranking of universities in terms of their rejection rates of prospective students. That determines how selective they are and how hard to enroll in them.

4) In terms of country scientific research ranking, the ranking, in many cases, is proportional to the budget spent by the country on scientific research. The strange thing is that the Gulf States don't spend much (compared with their GDPs) money on that. For example, Saudi Arabia is one of the G20 group, but its research spending and its research productivity is not proportional to that. For example, the US spends more than 273 billion dollars on research and development while Saudi Arabia spends less than 2 billions. Compare that with a country in which the Arabs lived for hundreds of years such as Portugal. (By the way, the name of this country is from an Arab origin. It comes from the word "Burtuqal" which means oranges.) This country spends on research twice as much of Saudi Arabia although it's GDP is less than one third of that of Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, a small country such as Singapore is amazing in terms of its scientific research. As you may know, this country is almost a one–city country and it was a part of federal Malaysia. It also has one of the best universities in the world. Regarding Arab countries, during the past few years, Egypt was number one followed usually by some countries of the greater Arab Maghreb such as Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. In one of the rankings a few years ago, Palestine was #111 in the world. Turkey is the #1 Muslim country in research spending and the number of scientific papers followed by Iran. But, Turkey spends much more money on scientific research than Iran. (The GPD of Iran is less than that of Turkey which is a member of G20.) The difference between their rankings is usually two spots (positions.) But, I think Iran has more advanced research than Turkey. It's one of the leading countries in the world in robots, stem–cell research, rockets, nanotechnology, satellites, submarines, etc.

5) There is interesting data on the Website of the Central Bureau of Statistics about the number of school students who go to universities and the percentage of failures of students, etc.

6) There are studies done by the Ministry of Planning & Development and studies done by researchers about the job market (in Palestine and other countries) of each field of study and the projections for the future as well as salaries paid. By the way, for those of you who don't know, the word "salary" comes originally from "salt." It started when employees were paid salt in return of their work. (Salt was expensive at that time.) Of course, long before, employees were given other things (in return of work) such as beer.

7) The number of students in Harvard is 21,000. Only 6,700 of them are undergrads. The number of students in MIT is 11,319. Only 4,512 of them are undergrads. The number of students in Oxford is 11,603. Only 500 of them are undergrads. The number of undergrads in Cambridge is 12,230 out of 19,515. Thus, the first three universities listed here are more grad schools than undergrad while the fourth is the opposite. That indicated the first three are ore research–oriented than the fourth. Among those, Harvard has the highest endowment which is more than 37 billion dollars followed by MIT. (Compare that with the GDP of some countries!) But, among them MIT has the best salaries for students after graduation. However, these universities are not the ones that have the best salaries for their academics. The highest paid salaries are in Columbia University (Harvard was No. 1 before) and the highest paid professor is Prof. David Silvers of Columbia University whose salary is $4.33 millions. (Maybe they must call him David Gold instead of David Silvers.) By the way, Barak Husein Obama has a degree from Columbia University. The two Roosvelts, the two Adams, and J.F.K have degrees from Harvard. The two Bushs have degrees from Yale while Bill Clinton from Georgetown. Margret Thatcher, Tony Blair, David Cameron and Theresa May are graduates of Oxford. Moreover, the US is No. 2 in terms of average salaries of academics followed by Canada. Australia is No 1. Also, the 4 universities listed before are not the most expensive universities. But, Columbia University is the second most expensive university. Moreover, the largest universities in the US (not in the world) are CUNY followed by SUNY.

8) It is interesting to see the rejection rate of prospective students who apply to those universities and also the retention rate, the graduation rate and the on–time graduation rate.

9) Alquds Open University used to take sometimes more than 20 percent of prospective students who enroll in Palestinian universities.

The following is quoted from wikipedia. I stress that none of the rankings is scientific. Each ranking has problems.

The Arab world is home to one of the oldest universities in the world, Al-Azhar University, established in the tenth century C.E. in Cairo.

Despite significant changes, Arab universities continue to receive relatively poor evaluations from the major global university-ranking systems.

Bahrain, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, and the UAE have the highest percentage of students enrolled in private universities (above 50 percent), while Iraq, Libya, Morocco, and Sudan have the lowest percentage of enrollment in private universities (20 percent or less).^[3]

These (not always successful) reforms and trends include increasing privatization, calls for greater access, improving the capability of universities to meet the demands of society, matching educational "outputs" with labor market needs, and negotiating a competitive global education market.

The Arab States of the Persian Gulf - Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates - have embraced the "Western" model of higher education perhaps more than any other Arab country. In countries such as Qatar and UAE, this embrace is reflected by a multitude of foreign "branch" campuses, particularly in Education City in Qatar, and Dubai Academic City. Roughly one-third of all international branch campuses are located in the Arab world, with the vast majority in the Persian Gulf region - and especially in Qatar and UAE. One reason for the growth of foreign branch campuses is Arab leaders' willingness and ability to invest large amounts of money in the projects. Scholars have identified other important explanations for this trend, such as the need to provide a growing youth population with educational options that will prepare them to succeed in a global, knowledge-based economy. Political leaders in Arab states of the Persian Gulf are utilizing specialized "Western" universities to compete with local institutions and fill the gaps in their educational programs. And though Persian Gulf countries are also increasingly sending their citizens overseas to study, the branch campuses provided more options for those students who cannot - for a variety of reasons - go abroad to study.

Arab universities have little representation in the major university-ranking systems - Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), World University Rankings (WUR), and QS World University Rankings (QS).

The QS rankings, produced by Quacquarelli Symonds,^[25] uses six indicators to rank universities: academic reputation (as determined from surveys), employer reputation (as determined from surveys), faculty-student ratio, citations per faculty, proportion of international students, and proportion of international faculty.

The QS rankings include the highest number of ranked Arab universities, mostly because this system ranks many more universities (800) than either ARWU (500) or WUR (400).

The following is quoted for University World News:

Despite dramatic growth since the 1990s in the number of private institutions, which make up about 45% of all Arab universities and have a market size of US$1.2 billion in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates alone, these institutions continue to have little impact on the development of higher education systems in the Arab world.

This is due to limited capacity, lack of academic credibility, absence of quality control and performance standards, and the perceived threat to Arab cultural identity that branches of Western universities represent.

Two-thirds (around 70) of the new universities founded in the Arab states since 1993 are private, and at least 50 of them are branches of Western, mostly American, universities, according to another 2009 report, The Politics of Higher Education in the Middle East: Problems and prospects.

However, the number of private universities is increasing: of 152 new universities established in Arab countries from 2003-08, 115 were private - about 4.4 times the figure for 1993.

For example, Jordan has at least 12 private universities and Lebanon has only one public university and 28 private institutions. Syria has licensed some 20 private universities since 2001, 14 of which are up and running. Tunisia had the highest increase in the number of universities, up from 22 in 2003 to 44 in 2008, including 31 private universities.

The following is quoted from Times and Higher Education:

Saudi Arabia has triumphed in a snapshot ranking released on Thursday: the top universities in the Arab world.

Three of the top five universities were in Saudi Arabia, while Morocco and Egypt also secured three spots each in the top 15.

The ranking is an initial release before consultation with the sector to determine how best to evaluate the region.

Although none of the featured universities achieves a position higher than the top 300 in the overall World University Rankings, the two best universities in the Arab World - King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia and the American University of Beirut in Lebanon - achieved high scores for their international outlook.

The United Arab Emirates University and the American University of Sharjah, both in the United Arab Emirates, achieved high enough scores for international outlook to also make it into the top 15 of a recent World's Most International Universities ranking.

At the top of that ranking, and at position six in the Arab world snapshot, is Qatar University. Its extremely high international score is based on proportions of international students, staff and collaborations - unsurprisingly high in a country where only 13 percent of the population are Qatari nationals.

In addition to some high international scores, the ranking also includes impressive scores for industry income. Both King Abdulaziz University and King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Saudi Arabia earn higher than average income from industry.

See the full top 15 here.

Here are links to rankings and higher education in the Arab World and Palestine:

http://www.4icu.org/

http://www.4icu.org/top-universities-world/

http://www.birzeit.edu/en/news/birzeit-remains-1st-palestine-enters-top-50-arab-universities-qs-rankings

https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/arab-region-university-rankings/2016

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/news/top-universities-arab-world

http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20111109132240914

http://www.yourmiddleeast.com/special-reports/article/the-middle-east-university-list_672

https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%82%D8%A7%D8%A6%D9%85%D8%A9_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AC%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%B9%D8%A7%D8%AA_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D8%B1%D8%A8%D9%8A%D8%A9

http://www.usnews.com/education/arab-region-universities/articles/us-news-ranks-best-arab-region-universities

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_and_university_rankings