Morocco's Universities: Money Laundering 101

 
This article from AllAfrica.com caught my eye today. It details some of the problems that have stifled higher education reform in Morocco. Here are some key points from the article:

• Morocco has 15 public universities. The total number of students enrolled in 2009-2010 was 306,595. (That's 0.95% of Morocco's 32 million people. The United States has approximately 14.2 million university students or about 4.75% of the total population.)
• King Hassan II enacted sweeping education reform in 1999, the year of his death, that was continued by his son and successor Mohammed VI. A major piece of this reform was granting financial and administrative autonomy to the university administrations. Another aspect of the reform was the adoption of a modular system, diving the academic year into semesters and the semesters into modules. The reforms also created Masters Degrees for the first time. 
• Sources quoted in the article complained about the backwardness of Morocco's teaching standards and practices. They stated how they desire "training" for the work force, not "teaching", which is all students receive now.

Not much in the article surprised me. I can vouch for bad teaching conditions, poor pedagogy, and an overall dysfunctional system. What did surprise me was that each university has control over its finances. To me this just seems like a terrible idea.

The article cites a "statement of accounts" from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Ben-Msik in Casablanca. It spent over $800,000 in 2010, so, as the article says, it has plenty of money. But $60,000 of this went to "catering and accommodation" which is funny because Ben-Msik "has no restaurant and no residence halls for students." At least they spent $633 on books for the library.

I understand the logic behind making your universities autonomous. It's an 'enlightened' thing to do. Having all of your universities under a large, centralized administration can be inefficient and ineffective, that's obvious. Also, the idea of having a single curriculum for the whole country (which still exists more or less) runs contrary to a 'liberal' concept of higher education. But at the same time, I can't imagine trying to enact major reforms in a country as corrupt as Morocco by reducing the accountability on the actors you depend on to enact said reforms. No wonder the situation hasn't improved in 12 years.

I always wondered why the situation seemed so stagnant at my university. Regular strikes against the poor conditions never achieved substantial changes. I had thought maybe it was a sinister plot by the Ministry of Education to keep Moroccans poorly educated so that they were easier to manipulate. That may still be true, but the simpler and more probable answer is that there's a lot of money to be made in running a dysfunctional public university in Morocco. An average professor's annual salary is about $13,500. If the Ministry of Education gives each university $800,000 every year, then the Dean probably takes $50,000, the Vice-Dean $25,000, and so on down the line until everyone gets a cut. Whatever is left goes to books.

Clearly, more accountability is the solution. I'm not an expert in education reform, but I imagine that if each university were held responsible for such things the number of books in its library, the student to faculty ratio, test scores, etc., it would bring about many positive changes. But this is hard to achieve in a place where people can be easily persuaded to overlook certain things everywhere, not just in the higher education system. Without a doubt, the biggest obstacle to Morocco's economic and social development its culture of corruption

And I always found it so strange why my department never wanted me to make copies.