Public Vs. Private and the Access to Opportunity

    Sometimes I take the opportunities available to me for granted. Although I may wake up every Monday from September to May complaining about needing to make that morning’s first class, the fact of the matter is that my own ability to attend those classes is a gift unto itself. This has been a thought rattling around my brain for the past few months but it has especially come to mind as we’ve toured several of Morocco’s places of higher education on this trip (something I only have access to thanks to me being a student at UGA.) As we saw both sides of Morocco’s loosening education system, it was hard not to notice similarities in the differences between the fully public ENA and the semi-privatized model of AUI. One of the ENA graduate students that came with us to visit AUI would joke about how the students there were all “rich kids” because they could afford the cost of tuition in a country where public universities are tuition-free, a sentiment I myself held against private school students throughout my years in the K-12 public school system back home. While I never asked students about their high school education and if it was at a public institution as well, the distinction between these two matters more than just in prestige.

    For Moroccan students with high hopes of attaining both a college education and a job thereafter, the time spent in a public school throughout their childhood versus a private institution can often end up being the difference in them reaching those goals. Thanks to the so-called “Arabization” of Moroccan public schools in the 1980s and many stem fields operating in French rather than Arabic, private school graduates (who spent their childhood being taught in French) often find themselves more capable of operating in these fields and thus find themselves being placed in more prestigious Moroccan universities (Sanga, 2022). This inability to access the most selective of Morocco’s universities cascades into a further issue of finding employment after graduation, as “unemployment rates for graduates of non-selective public university faculties are extremely high, reaching 18.7 percent four years after graduation in 2018” (Sanga, 2022), comparing to 8.5% and 5.6% for selective-public and private university graduates respectively. 

    Speaking as someone who truly did not put much effort into achieving high marks in high school, I should be grateful that the market for college education is as saturated as it is. It is hard to judge UGA’s prestige compared to other public universities, but in theorizing how my educational journey has led me so far within the context of the market Moroccan students operate makes me feel even luckier to have landed at UGA. While I’m sure there is a clear pathway to elite private schools sending graduates to Ivys, the ability for any given public school graduate to still attend and succeed at the university level is something we should all be thankful for.

Sanga, O. (2022, October 31). Education in Morocco. World Education News + Reviews. https://wenr.wes.org/2022/10/education-in-morocco