The Role of Higher Education in Lebanon’s Recovery

Tumultuous and cataclysmic as Lebanon’s current crisis has been and continues to be, there should be no doubt that the country will eventually survive it and forge ahead. This may sound like an overly optimistic statement given the accelerating worsening of the crisis, but it is important to remember that this is not the first time Lebanon has had a prolonged encounter with adversity and it may well not be the last. Known for its agility and adaptability, Lebanon will undoubtedly find its way to normalcy. The question is: What role does the higher education sector have in working toward recovery and how can this role be enhanced?

The historic role played by the higher education sector in building Lebanon’s brand as a regional hub and a prime producer of advanced human capital should qualify our sector to spearhead recovery. This is a direct function of its being responsible for the country’s main competitive asset: highly trained human resources exportable to and coveted by all corners of the globe. During the extended period of Lebanon’s status as a regional hub, its success was mainly built on three sectors, namely financial services, healthcare and tourism. All three depended on the robust higher education system we had then. Despite its many problems today, this system continues to have some top institutions potentially capable of leading the recovery process. To do so, we will have to overcome many obstacles, introduce serious changes, and embrace innovations that are changing the face of higher education throughout the world.

Major Ills that Afflict the Higher Education Sector

The manifestations and symptoms of the crisis in the higher education sector are manifold. Four in particular are primary and give rise to a number of secondary symptoms.

The main four are: 

1. Resource erosion – mostly due to the economic meltdown, currency mayhem, multiple exchange rates, and the spiraling rise in the dollar value against the local currency. Some universities found themselves grappling with dwarfed budgets that in real terms became a tiny fraction of what they used to be. Such budgets fell short of meeting even minimal operating expenses not to mention capital projects. The few universities with endowments to draw on were, relatively speaking, in better shape and have already all but restored their equilibrium. 

2. Faculty, physician, and staff attrition in search of better opportunities outside Lebanon. Attrition rates hovered around 30 percent with little or no chance of replacement under prevailing circumstances. 

3. Failure to prioritize investing in innovation particularly state-of-the-art degree and diploma programs as well as new modes of learning and delivery. This left many institutions with traditional programs lagging behind academic developments in the region and the world. It is little wonder that even a cursory look across our higher education landscape reveals very few innovation centers, little emphasis on entrepreneurship, hardly any AI and ML programs, and precious little by way of interdisciplinary degrees. On the delivery side, we generally lack PBL approaches, experiential learning, and other forms of proactive, learner-centered pedagogical strategies. What is noteworthy is that many of these innovations can now be found at several universities in the region and many of the top-ranked Middle Eastern universities are not Lebanon-based. The long-term implications are ominous.

4. The above three limitations combined helped create a situation where university students in Lebanon at many of our institutions lost their competitive edge vis-à-vis their counterparts outside Lebanon and are already facing dimmer employment prospects in the region. This problem is further exacerbated by four additional disconcerting realities, namely:

   • Lebanon has fewer professional school accreditations in, say, Business, Engineering, Architecture, Computer Science etc. than KSA, Kuwait, the UAE, and several other countries in the region. These are traditionally employment markets that have absorbed thousands of Lebanese university graduates. 

   • The shrinkage in the Lebanese economy from over $60 billion in 2019 to less than $18 billion now has meant massive devastation of local employment markets and loss of real opportunities for links between academia and industry. This has deepened the insularity of the higher education sector. 
     

   • Institutional insularity can also be seen in the lack of inter-university cooperation programs within Lebanon or among Lebanese universities and their regional counterparts. Such networking is now an essential part of survival, let alone moving to the next level.

   • Only less than a handful of Lebanese Universities appear in credible ranking surveys that are now an integral part of the higher education scene.

A Roadmap to Lead Recovery

Despite its many current afflictions, the Lebanese higher education sector that was historically at the heart of turning Lebanon into a regional hub is called upon to lead the regeneration /recovery process. Three key reasons account for this imperative:

• Experiences of countries like Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and Malaysia that clearly show that investment in human capital is the surest way to sustainable economic development. Higher education is currently undergoing a major restructuring to proactively cope with the implications of open AI, which will eliminate millions of jobs and change the nature of employment. This is our opportunity to be early adopters of changes that will sweep our sector anyway. If we do so now, we might have a chance to reverse the tide and reestablish our lead. 

• Lebanon’s ability to continue to be a human capital exporter depends almost in its entirety on the higher education sector. We have a solid foundation to build on but serious changes in content and delivery are needed. Changes, in equal urgency, are needed by way of acquiring more resources, optimizing their use, and restructuring the sector to become aligned with emerging trends imposed by the revolution in information technology. Another major objective of the needed restructuring will be the need to enhance our students’ critical thinking capabilities and turn them into self-renewing, life-long learners. 

• A major part of the needed resources should be sought through grants, international links, fundraising, networking and consortia joining as well as diverting resources from areas that have outlived their purpose.

Needed Steps for Leading Recovery 

1. Revamping the government regulatory process exercising oversight authority over the higher education sector toward more serious quality control, faculty qualifications, facilities etc. as well as substantive evaluation, regular third-party assessment and a significantly higher level of professionalism. 

2. Introducing a national accreditation system inspired by leading international models. This is an advanced form of third-party assessment that ensures quality delivery and maintains the credibility of the sector. Several regional countries like the UAE have excellent examples we can learn from.

3. Starting a consortium among leading private universities with a view to sharing information and resources. The purpose would be to launch new graduate programs in cutting-edge areas to produce future-proof graduates able to compete anywhere in the world. The list of such programs can be easily agreed upon. Another purpose of the suggested consortium will be to turn participating universities into hubs for innovation and applied research. This can be a major step for linking academia to industry R&D. This will be nothing short of a paradigm shift for many universities but it surely will be a paradigm shift whose time has come. In a real way, it is now or never. 

This is a call to action, a wake-up message before it becomes too late and an open invitation to all of us to do what is right by the country and its future generations.