The Economist USA - 10.08.2019

The EconomistAugust 10th 2019 35

1

“I

n rwanda it’snot easy to get a job,”

says Jean-Paul Bahati, a student at Kep-

ler, a college founded in Kigali in 2013. But

the 22-year-old believes his course will

help him stand out. He studies health-care

management, a growing industry in Rwan-

da. Kepler’s degrees are accredited by

Southern New Hampshire University

(snhu), which runs one of the largest on-

line universities in America. The first six

months are a crash course in skills such as

critical thinking, English, communication

and it. “I like that Kepler knows what em-

ployers want,” says Mr Bahati.

In recent decades millions of young

people like Mr Bahati have swelled the

number of students in sub-Saharan Africa.

Today 8m are in tertiary education, a term

that includes vocational colleges and uni-

versities. That is about 9% of young peo-

ple—more than double the share in 2000

(4%), but far lower than in other regions

(see chart). In South Asia the share is 25%,

in Latin America and the Caribbean, 51%.

Both the number and share of young

people in tertiary education in sub-Saha-

ran Africa will keep growing. The region

has about 90m people aged 20-24, a figure

projected to double over the next 30 years.

Whereas 42% of that age group had com-

pleted secondary school in 2012, 59% are

forecast to do so by 2030. If African coun-

tries are to meet the aspirations of educat-

ed young people, they must ensure there

are opportunities for further study.

So far they have struggled. State-run in-

stitutions that trained the post-colonial

elites are finding it hard to serve a mass

market. In much of the region public fund-

ing per student has fallen since the late

1990s as enrolment has surged.

This reflects competing priorities. In

the poorest African countries it costs 27

times more to fund a university place than

one at primary school. Since students typi-

cally come from affluent families, univer-

sity spending subsidises the children of

elites. In Ghana, the higher-education

spending that goes to the richest tenth of

households is 135 times that spent on the

poorest tenth. Policymakers find them-

selves deciding whether to spend scarce re-

sources on helping poor children attend

school or rich children go to university.

The effects of spreading public funding

thinly are apparent on campuses. African

universities have 50% more students per

professor than the global average. Students

are more likely to study humanities de-

grees than science ones, which are more

expensive to teach. Over 70% of graduates

have arts degrees, versus 53% in Asia.

More young people are heading abroad

instead. In 2017 some 374,000 studied over-

seas, up from 156,000 two decades earlier.

Many never return. One in nine Africans

with a tertiary qualification lives in an

oecdcountry, compared with one in 13 Lat-

in Americans and one in 30 Asians.

With the public sector struggling to

meet demand for places and to offer a high-

quality education, the private sector is fill-

ing the gap. From 1990 to 2014 the number

of public universities in sub-Saharan Afri-

ca rose from 100 to 500, while private uni-

versities grew from 30 to more than 1,000.

Many are small. In Kigali, the University of

Rwanda has 30,000 students, while private

ones have a few hundred each. But they are

enrolling a growing proportion of stu-

dents, notes Daniel Levy of the University

of Albany. In 2000 about 10% of African

students went to private institutions; by

2015 the share was 20%. In Rwanda more

than half do so.

Students at private universities often

benefit from new ways of teaching. Consid-

er Ashesi, which has grown steadily since

its founding in 2002 in Accra. Much of Gha-

naian higher education is based on rote

learning, observes Patrick Awuah, its foun-

der and a former Microsoft engineer, and

was not “teaching students to think criti-

cally”. He based Asheshi on American liber-

al-arts colleges, where students combine

humanities and sciences.

Vocational outfits can innovate, too.

Tertiary education in Africa

A higher challenge

KIGALI

New initiatives hint at how Africa’s universities can respond to its youth boom

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