Challenges in The Education Sector
Despite having a number of private institutes the enrollment in private higher education institutes is still low, less than 3.5 percent of total university population. Private institutes also suffer from less qualified or inadequate staff. This is primarily due to inhibiting tuition costs. Curriculum of especially the business schools is outdated and needs to be revised according to the changing demands of the labor market. Private sector companies also do not make sufficient contribution in providing working knowledge to professional institutes of the current business environment.
Internal efficiency is also low with high dropout and repetition rates. There is also an unmet need of rising demand of middle schools after achieving high access rates in primary education. The problem is more acute in the rural schools due to inadequate supply and quality of instructional materials. The poor quality of education becomes an even greater problem due to Arabic-Berber language issues. As most of the Berber family children hardly know any Arabic, which is the medium of instruction in schools, when students enter primary level.
Low literacy in the Maghreb region is also a major problem. In Morocco, the adult illiteracy rate is still at a high at around 40 percent in 2007, despite concerted efforts being made since independence in 1956 to reduce the rate of illiteracy which at that time was 87 percent. In absolute terms the illiterate adults have grown from six to nine million persons. Morocco is one of the five Arab countries in which 70 percent of the some 70 million illiterate adults in the Arab world are concentrated. In rural areas and for female gender the problem is even worse; three quarters of women were considered to be illiterate in 2004.
Then there has been a high emigration rate of skilled workers, that is, the total number of highly skilled emigrants to the total number of educated people back home is high. This way Morocco is losing a substantial number of skilled work force to foreign countries, being the largest migrant population among North Africans in Europe.
Read more about this topic: Education In Morocco
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