By the Gazette Editorial Board While inspecting the construction work on the King Salman University in South Sinai, Minister of Higher Education Khaled Abdul Ghaffar announced that the ministry's new strategy was based on building more national universities and bringing the number up to 32 by 2030. The minister said the aim was to offer excellent educational services to students and to reduce the pressure on the government universities. The national (Ahleya) universities in Egypt are limited in number. The first, Nile University, was established in 2007 as a non-governmental, non-profit research university. National universities are different from government universities in that they are run by a board of trustees and are funded mainly by donations. These non-profit universities offer scholarships, which require varying grades, are based on annual scores and take the social and economic conditions of the students into consideration. In other words, these universities, though fee-paying, determine what each student should pay for each course, according to his/her social background and financial means. As well as offering good educational curricula, these universities offer a solution to the dilemma facing government universities which is how not to breach the right of the poor to higher education by providing good paid education that is still affordable. This could be why Minister Abdul Ghaffar promised to build more of these universities in the next 12 years. Providing free education up to the university stage is a very sensitive issue in Egypt where a big percentage of people live under the poverty line. Besides, most of the poor believe that a university certificate is the key to their children upgrading their social and economic conditions. Thus, any suggestion of increasing fees at government universities is met with fierce opposition. However, the limited financial resources available to government universities have resulted in a noticeable deterioration in the standard of learning at these universities. So, most of them have resorted to introducing some new paid courses that offer better education. These courses attract young people from middle and upper middle class families who want their children to have an excellent education at the prestigious government universities. However, such courses, though they have helped the government universities financially, have created class divisions on campus. Therefore, it might be better to establish more national universities to give the rich and the poor access to the same level of education, with each student paying according to his/her means, rather than dividing the students into rich and poor and giving each student only the kind of education they can afford.
