If you studied university in many parts of the Middle East, try asking yourself or any of your friends what their favorite part of university was, and a lot of them will say the dorm life, late-night conversations, or the campus freedom. Very few will tell you their favorite part was what they learned in class.
A few days ago, I was lazily browsing Hacker News when I came across a provocative blog post titled “Math is Erotic.” Without going into too much detail about the contents of the post itself — which, for reference, has very little erotica — the part that really caught my attention was below:
The function universities have long played is less one of educating than of credentialing.
I studied Environmental Engineering in Jordan, and more than 10 years after graduating, the above resonates on a profound level with me. I assume a lot of people from the Arab world and South Asia would relate to this, too.
At the risk of sounding like yet another entrepreneur talking smack about university education, hear me out: the German Jordanian University, where I studied, was a conveyor belt clattering along slowly to secure jobs abroad for young Jordanians. As the name implies, engineering students were meant to spend 4 years in Jordan, and another mandatory year in Germany. It started as a joint project in 2005 between the governments of Jordan and Germany.