CAIRO - Saeed Abdel-Hafeez, a retired engineer, is particularly grateful to Gamal Abdel-Nasser, who ruled Egypt form 1952 to 1970, because he ordered that education should be offered free of charge for all Egyptians in different educational stages, including university. "Had it not been for him, I would never have got the chance to attend the Engineering School at Cairo University," says Abdel-Hafeez, a father of four, all of them graduates of public universities too. "However, I am worried that my grandchildren might not have access to the kind of high-quality, free university education we had in the 1960s," he adds. "Over recent years, there has been a shift in this country towards creating private universities, whose fees only the rich can afford." Since the 1990s, around 17 private universities have sprung up across this country of 80 million people, about 40 per cent of whom live below the poverty line, according to the World Bank. Egypt has 19 governmental universities, which are suffering from a shortage of money and suitable facilities. Students attending oversized classes continue to receive free education at these public institutions. Critics say that the quality of the graduates from these universities is not good enough to meet the requirements of a tight local job market. However, a recent call by Minister of Education Gamal Eddin Moussa to charge students attending public universities has triggered sharp criticism. In making the suggestion, Moussa, who was renamed Minister of Education earlier this year after President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in a popular revolt, said that continued free education at governmental universities violates social justice. "It means offering a free service to the wealthy students at the expense of the poor," he was quoted by the local media as saying at a recent seminar in Cairo. He suggested that free-of-charge education should be restricted to pre-university education, which serves tens of millions of Egyptians. The money saved, he explained, could be channelled into improving the national schooling system. "This suggestion is bad for society," says Yehia el-Qazaz, a professor in the Science School of Helwan University, a public university in southern Cairo. "New financial resources should be found in order to upgrade the quality of university education, which should continue to be free of charge," he adds. According to el-Qazaz, many countries adopt various methods to ensure that university education remains available for free. "These methods take the shape of free scholarships offered by the State to students. Others offer loans to students, who have to repay them after they graduate and get a job. A third way is to oblige rich students to pay fees for their education with these fees deducted from their parents' taxes," he explains. To Shebl Badran, the Dean of the Education School at Alexandria University (another public university), levying fees for studies at governmental universities would only harm the poor. "Children from wealthy families already pay for their education, whether at university or school," he said. "With the spread of fee-paying education in Egypt, those families will start enrolling their children at the private institutions," he told the independent newspaper Al-Shorouq. "Thus students from the poor and the middle classes will be the only ones attending public universities." Badran went a step further to demand the expansion of free university education in Egypt. "While only 25 per cent of school leavers in Egypt attend university, more than 45 per cent do so in several other Arab countries, surging to 81 per cent in Lebanon.”
