Privatizing Higher Education in a predominantly public and statist system: perspectives from Egypt

This paper seeks to problematize the notion of privatization, challenging its meaning particularly when seen from a country with a very strong emphasis on the predominance of the state and of its executive arm over society such as Egypt. Drawing on researches started in 2008 and still ongoing, I propose to problematize this notion by looking at four interrelated aspects – the level of policy, the resulting changes in governance (also in public universities), different kinds of private universities, and their role in positioning Egypt on the regional market for higher education, for example by attracting students from the global south. The paper will conclude with a plea for an ethnographic analysis of the university, as a crucial institution in the contemporary world. I will first present a discussion of privatization efforts in the country, with a particular reference to the relatively recent (early 1990s) introduction of low-fees, for-profit private universities in a country in which education had been nationalized since the post-independence era. By briefly focusing on how private universities were established, their context and history, I introduce a discussion of universities’ changing business models and operations. These changes are not limited to the private sector, and contribute to the establishing of a reference model to which also public universities increasingly have to conform. Then, I will discuss some of the recent reform packages proposed in the 2000s, which include internationalization and privatization policies, as well as programs intended to enhance the higher education sector, sponsored by the World Bank, and are marked by a high degree of isomorphism with global trends. Yet they are rarely implemented, and their translations are shaped by the logics of the local contexts. I will conclude this second part by discussing how audit and quality measurement practices are implemented at a particular private university, the 6 October University, an Egyptian for-profit private university on which I carried out ethnographic research in 2010 and 2012. Building on these new reforms, a relatively new, corporate model of private, for-profit higher education in Egypt, has emerged, in stark contrast with pre-existing modes of private and public higher education. In the concluding part of the paper, I will present some reflections on how this model fits within the new understanding of the state, in a context of shrinking spaces of critique and freedom. Finally, I will turn the attention to the role private universities in the new regional market for higher education. The “new” private universities (not including state universities, and the “old” ones such as Al-Azhar and AUC) are thus the new interesting phenomenon to be studied in order to locate south-south influence in students' exchanges in the last 15 years in Egypt. With student fees well below international standards, reduced costs of living, and (until 2011) a widespread sense of safety, Egypt and particularly Cairo are reasonable options for certain segments of the wide middle class that is prospering in many Gulf countries.