The new German University in Cairo will be offering a German curriculum, taught in English, with a focus on science and technology. Shaden Shehab examines the ambitious educational endeavour's prospects for success The opening of a new German University in Cairo (GUC) has certainly been a high-profile affair. The first German university to be established outside Germany, its inauguration will be presided over by none other than President Hosni Mubarak and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. Scheduled for 5 October, the opening will also feature Mrs Suzanne Mubarak and a number of Egyptian and German ministers and businessmen. Germany's involvement in the project is both technical and financial. Although officially, the institution is a private Egyptian university established according to presidential decree No.27 for the year 2002, the GUC is also under the patronage of the German state universities of Ulm and Stuttgart. Its campus is identical to Ulm University's, and its curricula have been developed in collaboration with both Ulm and Stuttgart. The GUC is also associated with the German Ministry of Science, Research and Arts in Baden- Wuerttemberg, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the German Embassy in Cairo, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Arab- German Chamber of Industry and Commerce (AHK). Prominent German companies like Mercedes, Siemens and Telekom are also providing the university with support. The project's LE65 million first phase (which is being inaugurated next week) has been built on 27 feddans in New Cairo's fifth district. The final phase, budgeted at LE1 billion and scheduled to be completed by 2005, spans 136 feddans. The new university is designed to eventually serve around 5000 students. Its current capacity is 1400. About 700 students are enrolled to begin its first semester of operation on 7 October. Only 41 of these students are non-Egyptian. The university is the brainchild of Ashraf Mansour, an Egyptian who obtained his PhD in physics from Ulm University. In 1994, Mansour presented both the German and Egyptian governments with a proposal to establish a German University of Technology for the Middle East in Cairo. "The idea to establish the university was not initiated by the governments of Egypt or Germany, although there was encouragement from both," said Mansour, who is chairman of the university's board of trustees. "I made contacts in both countries and by the end of 2000, after presenting extensive studies and documents, I got a verbal agreement from both sides," Mansour told Al-Ahram Weekly. By 2002, a presidential decree establishing the university had been issued. Mansour is a Cairo University graduate who studied in Germany thanks to a DAAD scholarship. He made a point of differentiating between the GUC and other private universities in Egypt like the American University in Cairo (AUC). "Mubarak and Schroeder would not inaugurate [just any] private university," he said. "It was established based on the Egyptian private university law but it is a German university." The AUC has been operating since 1919 via a bilateral agreement between Egypt and the United States. A July 1996 presidential decree, meanwhile, authorised the establishment of four private universities -- Misr International University, the University of Modern Sciences, Sixth of October University and the University of Science and Technology. Critics have argued that these universities were established far too hastily and that the regulatory framework governing them was inadequate. Other oft repeated claims regarding these private universities are that they emphasise profit over quality, have an insufficient teaching staff, laboratories that are not very well equipped and, when it comes to their faculties of medicine, poor clinical training. Those are some of the reasons why education officials see the arrival of the GUC onto the scene as good news. The new university, according to Higher Education Minister Mufid Shehab, "will provide technological specialisations that Egypt needs, and produce distinguished graduates who will help Egyptian society prosper". Shehab told the Weekly that, "we fully support all private universities as long as they keep a high profile. The main objective of any private university should not be profit, but to provide quality education and new specialisations that are needed in our society." In fact, the new university will offer majors that are quite rare in both Egypt and the Middle East as a whole, including pharmacy and biotechnology, media engineering and technology, information engineering and technology, management technology, engineering and materials science and post graduate studies. The later phase will include faculties of basic sciences, applied sciences and arts, and human sciences and languages. Mansour, who is also a Cairo University chemistry professor, said, "we have studied both the local and international markets and have found that the GUC's fields of specialisation do not exist in the local market nor in the entire Arab region, despite the fact that we are in dire need of them." The language of instruction will be English, Mansour said, because Egypt has very few German schools. "We did not want to make the language an obstacle,' he said. Nevertheless, students will be encouraged to learn German as a second language, in order to help them continue their studies in Germany, if they wish to do so. "There will be opportunities for internships and training programmes at German enterprises. That's why the universities we will be cooperating with are situated in very industrialised areas in Germany," he said. Graduates' degrees are also accredited in Germany, and according to Mansour, the prospects for employment there are high, especially for the highest qualified graduates, since the country suffers from serious workforce shortages in the field of IT. GUC tuition ranges from LE15,000 to 25,000 per year, depending on the major, a price tag Mansour called reasonable. "Students will pay less than half of what their education actually costs," he said, stressing that what people must understand is that "this institution has not been established for commercial reasons but purely for the enhancement of educational levels in Egypt." Actually, private universities such as the AUC have consistently come under fire for charging high tuition fees -- often over LE30,000 per year -- and thus excluding all but students from rich families from benefiting from the education on offer there. Mansour argued that it was not accurate to call the new university a competitor to AUC and the others, since "the style of teaching is different and the fields of study are different. Let us just say that we are opening new markets." Twenty-five full scholarships will be on offer every year for outstanding students, with the potential for that number to rise. Mansour said tuition rates might even go down if German or Egyptian companies or businessmen end up pouring more money into the project. The GUC will not be accepting students based on the standard criteria used by other universities. "We are not seeking students who memorise books and get good marks in exams," Mansour said. "We want to develop the potentialities of distinguished and talented students." Applicants must take both an English language test and a reasoning test. The latter was tailored especially for the GUC over a period of 26 months. "It is not an IQ test but reveals the degree of intellectual energy and creativity," Mansour said. Students who are academically qualified, but do not pass the English test will take an English Language Intensive Course (ELIC) for one or two semesters before they can enroll. Mansour said that out of the 13 applicants with the highest thanaweya amma secondary school exam results, only five were accepted into the GUC. "But these five are real geniuses," Mansour said. Egyptian-German educational cooperation has its roots in the establishment of the DAAD scholarship committee in Egypt, which facilitated Egyptian students' pursuit of masters and PhD degrees in Germany. In the 1990s the Mubarak-Kohl project providing hands-on vocational training for youth was launched. The success of these forms of cooperation indicated, Mansour said, that there "is a demand in Egypt for the German approach to education-- and that is why the GUC was established."
