Universities not provide jobs, free education should

A university's basic role is to educate, not to provide job opportunities, and free higher education should not be generalized but should be based on a student's financial situation, Cairo University's president told Xinhua in an exclusive interview.

"We need to break the connection between education and employment. A university only teaches, while the labor market may need extra qualifications. A good university prepares its graduates to create job opportunities for themselves," Gaber Nassar explained, noting the government has already eight million employees serving the 90-million population.

Cairo University chief argued that the misconception linking education with employment intensifies demand on higher education and shortage of technical education graduates, stressing that government employment of higher education would burden the state.

Nassar said that there's no ultimate free of charge higher education and that it should be free only for students who deserve it.

"For example, 25 to 40 percent of university students in five faculties in Cairo University paid from 25,000 to 200,000 pounds in private language high schools and later got free higher education," Nassar lamented, noting that the free education system should be adjusted based on students' financial situation, the business of their parents, their standard of living, etc.

As for Cairo University's world ranking, Nassar said it is satisfactory given the difficult situation the country has been going through over the past six years of political turmoil that witnessed the ouster of two heads of state.

"The strongest and most objective of the four world rankings is China's Shanghai ranking, where we moved from 470 to 401. Meanwhile, we moved from 1,299 to around 501 in Spanish Webometrics ranking and we came 551 out of 800 in British QS ranking," he said.

He explained that Cairo University joins the race while already lacking about 30 percent of the required criteria due to the large number of students, citing that China's Peking University has seven faculties with about 15,000 students whose equivalents in Cairo University have 200,000 students.

Nassar banned wearing the niqab (face-covering veil) among the teaching staff based on "scientific considerations" that a communication-based teaching process cannot be done with a face-covered teacher.

"When we banned the niqab among professors, it started to disappear among students," Nassar boasted, adding that he limits extremist thoughts among students via artistic, cultural and reading activities as well as merging some 500 classrooms and offices used for prayer in campus into one mosque with one imam from the ministry of religious endowments.

"We hold classy concerts at the university's 5,000 seat theater with renowned musicians, we start a reading initiative via a library offering gifts and rewards, and we are studying the establishment of a cinema inside the campus for educational purposes, copying world top universities," he told Xinhua.

Nassar urged a cabinet structural reform to merge the country's over 30 ministries into 15 as extra unnecessary ministries cost money and time while the state is going through austerity, wondering why having a ministry for higher education and another for education.

"This is bureaucracy and waste of money, while the country's economic conditions require austerity. Ministries should be merged so that an average citizen can feel that the burdens of economic reform are distributed among all, including the government," the top professor argued.

Nassar came to office in 2013 when the university was in debt, and now the university has 2.6 billion Egyptian pounds (about 138 million U.S. dollars) in its bank account through transparent financial and administrative reform and development of research and production units.

"We enlarged scientific research budget from 23 million pounds (about 1.2 million dollars) in 2013 to 480 million pounds (about 25 million dollars) in 2016. We started to gain funds from our partnerships with many institutions around the world," Nassar pointed out, noting that his university jointly registered 18 international patents in nanotechnology fields with partners in Europe and the United States in the past two years.

With regards to cooperation with China, Nassar described China's educational experience as "inspiring," noting he visited Peking University in August and got acquainted with many aspects of this experience.

"Over the past 25 years, China managed to develop the mechanisms of higher education at its universities. The exchanging academic visits and the cooperation between Cairo University and Chinese universities are so important and really flourishing," Cairo University chief told Xinhua.

source: Xinhua