Startpage for Swedish National Agency for Higher Education

 
 
Please note! The Swedish National Agency for Higher Education was closed down on 31 December 2012. Instead two new agencies have been established: the Swedish Council for Higher Education and the Swedish Higher Education Authority. This website will continue to operate as the new agencies will have links to information it contains.  

91-85027-07-3

Higher Education in Iraq

The report (705 kb)
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Presentation at NAFSA 2004 Annual Conference


A presentationen was held by Andreas Arsalan from The National Agency for Higher Education on May 26 at the NAFSA Annual Conference in Baltimore, USA. The session was entitled Educational Developments in Iraq since 1990. Please find the handouts and overheads above.

Summary of the report


The National Agency for Higher Education evaluates foreign higher education programs for employment purposes in Sweden. Of the 3,000 applications that the Agency receives annually approximately 500 involve degrees from Iraq, making it the single largest country represented among the applicants.

Reliable information on the country´s education system, the quality of education, university admission requirements, the teacher/student ratio, research, etc. is crucial for the evaluation of Iraqi degrees. Existing information, however, is scarce and at least ten years old.

This report is the result of a study visit to Iraq which was conducted in May 2000 by Andreas Arsalan and Jonas Littorin of the Swedish European Network of Information Centres (ENIC) in May 2000.

The report focuses on the Iraqi education system in light of the political and economic sanctions inflicted on that country, the development of new forms of education, and the problems with fraudulent documents.

Besides meeting senior officers at the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, visits were made to the University of Baghdad, University of Technology, Mosul University, University of Babylon and the Foundation of Technical Institutes in Baghdad.

Interviews were conducted with university presidents, vice presidents and other faculty members. Moreover, we had the opportunity to meet with the president of the Foundation of Technical Institutes in Baghdad and employees at the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research.

This, however, warrants a note of methodological reservation: the report is not based on documents, but on interviews, conversations, impressions and observations. In other words, we have no written material at all to which we can refer. This has to do with the lack of printed documents in Iraq, but more to that later.

Hence, it must be stressed, the main focus of the report is on our experience from the fi eld. The report is focused on the present situation and changes during the nineties and does not claim to offer a full coverage of the education system and its future development.