In a recent interview, Emaar Group chairman Mohamed Alabbar stated that he thinks private school fess in the region are too high and risk excluding poorer children from the education system.
Mr Alabbar has questioned whether education should be privatised and said that the extortionately high private school fees were to blame for lack of access to high quality education and a general failure to prepare young people for the jobs market.
Alabbar said “I am very close to private educators. They suck the life out of the fees”. He added “I’m not sure if education should really be privatised. I know private schools have good discipline. But some of these fees - how can any human being pay like this?
“So it hurts, it hurts me that the guy who needs the most help, who can’t even afford to pay Dhs 2,000 per year…He’s the guy we need to help.
“The person who can pay Dhs 50,000, well, I don’t care, he can send his kids to school in London if he wishes. But what about that guy with seven kids who can’t afford to pay even Dhs 1,000 for their education. That’s where the pain is.”
The ninth annual ASDA'A Burson-Marsteller Arab Youth Survey 2017, which covers 16 Arab states, more than one-third (35%) of respondents cited unemployment as their biggest concern. And unemployment is the biggest obstacle that young Arab youths face in the Middle East.
The survey also revealed that only half of young Arabs (51%) have confidence in their governments to deal with youth unemployment, while 49% of the respondents said they were “not satisfied” with how schools prepare young people for the jobs world.
The survey was based on interviews with 3,500 16 to 24 year olds across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
At its launch in Dubai, Alabbar said: “Educators [in the region] need to stand together and say, ‘What are we doing? What did [students] get a low mark? Why did we fail them?’”
Fadi Ghandour, founder of UAE logistics firm Aramex and managing partner of Wamda Capital, suggested there was a disconnect between the education system - its syllabuses, educators and the knowledge they produced in students - and the wider needs of the jobs market.
“I don’t want to generalise, but the product that is coming out tells us that the education system is broken; the outcome of that system is broken. It needs us - private sector, government sector, educators - to come together and say, what do we need to do [to improve things]? The first thing to do is to declare it’s not working.”
Private school fees in the GCC are among the highest in the world, with annual fees at schools in Dubai and Abu Dhabi stretching to Dhs 80,000 in some cases.
Source: Arabian Business