vocational education in algeria, egypt and morocco

Vocational education in" Algeria, Egypt

and Morocco The crisis and its lessons*

Jamil Salmi

Vocational education is in crisis: After being hailed as a miracle solution for curing the problems of traditional general education systems in preparing young people for entry into the labour market, it is now coming under heavy criticism. In many countries, education admin- istrators and policy-makers are increasingly confronted with problems of low-quality training, growing expenditure against a background of diminishing resources, lack of responsiveness to labour-market needs, and growing unemployment for vocational education graduates. What has gone wrong? How is it possible that the success story of the previous decade has become a subject of acute controversy, to the extent that some education specialists are beginning to wonder whether improving the operation and performance of formal vocational education systems is at all possible and whether this mode of training should not be abandoned altogether:

Jami l Sa lmi (Morocco). Education economist, Div- ision of Human Resources, Middle East Department, The World Bank. Formerly Professor of Education Economics at the Centre for Education Planning and Orientation, Rabat. Author of ' Crise de l' enseigne- men te t reproduction sociale au Maroc" (unpublished thesis) and numerous articles on development studies.

This article focuses on the vocational education experience of three Arab countries in North Africa and the Middle East, Algeria, Egypt and Morocco, which are faced with relatively similar problems. While these countries have major differences in terms of development strategy and economic structure, each one launched in the early I98OS an ambitious programme to expand vocational education. The purpose of comparing the vocational education experience of these three countries is not to analyse systematically their similarities and differences, but to highlight core issues of strategic planning for human-resources development.

After outlining the characteristics of the current crisis, this article analyses the main constraints bearing upon the development of vocational education in these countries and considers options to overcome these problems and to solve existing conflicts. It also addresses the issue of the legitimacy and feasibility of further expansion of formal vocational education systems in the light of the current debate on the merits and disadvantages of that particular mode of training.

* The views expressed in this paper are the author's own and not necessarily those of the World Bank.

Proepects~ Vol. XX, No. I~ x99o

96 Jamil Salmi

From enthusiasm to disillusion

In 1961, the African Ministers of Education met in Addis Ababa under the auspices of Unesco and endorsed a comprehensive educational development plan calling for universal primary schooling, rapid increases in secondary- and higher-education enrolments, and major improvements in the quality of education. The ambitious quantitative objectives adopted by the conference reflected a commitment in newly independent African nations to develop large formal schooling systems. This was certainly the case in Morocco after independence in 1956 and in Algeria after the 1962 revolution. In Egypt, the drive to expand education had come even earlier as a direct result of the 1952 revolution. This enthusiasm was translated into policies which have enabled these countries to achieve substantial pro- gress in terms of educational development. In Morocco, primary-school eurolments increased by 8.5 per cent a year during the first twenty years after independence while secondary education grew by 2o per cent a year on the average. In Algeria, the primary- and secondary-school enrolment ratios increased between 196o and 198o from 46 per cent to 94 per cent and from I I per cent to 51 per cent respectively. In Egypt, enrolment growth in primary and secondary education was respectively 13 per cent and 15 per cent a year on average during that period. However, despite these impressive achievements during the I96OS and I97OS, a number of serious difficulties have emerged.

The rapid expansion of general education also had adverse consequences. Rising recurrent costs, low internal efficiency due to high attrition and drop-out rates, and a deteriorating quality of education were among the most visible symptoms of what Coombs (1968) re- ferred to ha the late I96OS as 'the world education crisis'. In Algeria, Egypt and Morocco, as in most developing countries, educators came to realize that the road to universal primary education was paved with unexpected obstacles. Growing concern was also expressed about

inappropriate curricula, insufficient scientific and technical training, unsuitable education outputs and unemployment among university graduates with a humanities or social-science background. This led to the observation that too much emphasis had been put on general education and that, as a corollary, vocational training had been neglected.

In the Arab world in particular, no significant attempts to develop vocational education on a large scale had taken place. It had been noted, as early as 1972, that 'on the whole, and with possibly one or two exceptions, vocational and technical education is still little more than decorative on the fringes of the national [education] systems' (Tibawi, 1972). In Algeria and Morocco, the education development strategy emphasized rapid expansion of general education streams while allowing for only limited growth of technical and vocational schools. In Morocco, for example, the few technical schools which had been operating under the responsibility of the Ministry of Education since independence were abolished in the mid-I96OS and converted into standard secondary schools. In I975, the realization that few vocational training programmes specifically oriented to the needs of the private sector existed led to the creation of a National Vocational Training Agency (OFPPT) under the authority of the Ministry of Labour. However, enxolments in the scheme remained small, representing no more than 2 per cent of the total schooled population by 1983 . In Algeria, the Secretary of State for Vocational Training had only 65 training centres with 23,0o0 students in 1979. Egypt stands out as an exception as there had been a tradition of secondary technical schools since the 195os. Toward the end of the I97OS, enrolments in industrial and agricultural schools represented approximately 18 per cent of total enxolments in upper-secondary education.

The relative neglect of vocational education in many Arab countries can be attributed to two main reasons. The first factor is historical. Colonial authorities often used vocational schools as second-class educational institutions

Vocational education in Algeria, Egypt and Morocco: the crisis and its lessons 97

for the ~natives'. In the three Maghrib countries, for instance, most of the schools opened by the French colonial authorities for the benefit of the local population had a vocational orientation. As a result, there was a strong popular rejection of this type of school after independence. The second factor was the perception that general education was an appropriate and legitimate way of training people for work with the government in countries where the public sector remained the main source of employment for many years after independence. In 1984, public- sector employment still accounted for 5o per cent of total employment in Algeria, 33 per cent in Egypt and 2o per cent in Morocco. In his famous article on the 'vocational school fallacy', Foster (1965) described very well this logical bias toward general education: Those who criticize the irrational nature of African demand for academic as opposed to vocational education fail to recognize that the strength of academic education has lain precisely in the fact that it is preeminently a vocational education providing access to those occupations with the most prestige and, most importantj the highest pay.

However, the absence of national vocational education policies in Algeria and Morocco and the relatively slow growth of technical education in Egypt during the I96OS and the I97OS did not prevent the proliferation, in the three countries, of training programmes set up by technical ministries and large public enterprises that felt an urgent need to develop their own vocational-training institutions to meet their specific needs for skilled manpower. As a general rule, these training institutions received adequate funding, were well managed and had a high external efficiency. Some of them, such as the centres of the National Phosphates Company in Morocco (OCP), of the National Petroleum Company in Algeria (SONATRACH) or those of the Military Production Companies in Egypt, have remained model institutions until today. However, from a national planning viewpoint, the development of these specialized vocational education institutions happened without any form of co-ordination and resulted in significant wastage of resources due to duplication and

overlapping. Confronted with growing financial and social pressure as a resuk of the education crisis, authorities in Algeria, Egypt and Morocco decided in the early I98os that the vocational- ization of general education was an appropriate answer to their common problems. Re- orienting the focus of the existing education systems toward technical and vocational subjects was seen as a way to address two issues at the same time: from an economic point of view, it would satisfy the objective of supplying skilled manpower to meet in a more appropriate way the needs of the productive sectors; from a social viewpoint, providing vocational education would ease demand for general education, help eliminate negative attitudes toward manual labour and increase employment prospects.

In Algeria, a full-fledged Ministry of Vo- cational Education was created in 1983 with the responsibility of developing a national training system aiming at satisfying the skill requirements of the economy and providing training to as many young people as possible. Responsi- bility for this task was transferred in I987 to the Ministry of Education. In Egypt the 1981 Edu- cation Law expressed a strong government commitment to a more rapid development of secondary technical education. This was translated in the 1983-87 development plan into concrete quantitative targets which were ad- justed upwards in 1987 . The Ministry of Education is now planning on enrolling as many as 7 ~ per cent of secondary-education students in technical schools. In Morocco, the government announced in July 1984 an ambitious plan for the development of vocational education. It was decided that the National Vocational Education Agency should, within four years, enrol 9o per cent of primary- and secondary-school drop-outs, an increase from 26 per cent in 1984. These belated moves echoed earlier trends in other parts of the world where, for the last two decades, many governments had been investing heavily in the development of technical school and vocational centres at the secondary level.

Today, however, after several years of rapid expansion of enrolments in the vocational edu-

9 8 yamil Salmi

cation systems of the three countrie% obstacles have cropped up. Resources are shrinking, the quality of training is deteriorating and graduates are finding it increasingly difficuk to gain access to the labour market. These vocational education systems seem to be out of control in the context of what could be labelled as the second education crisis.

The vocational education crisis in perspective

The mass expansion of general education in the I96os and I97OS took place at a time of relatively rapid economic growth. The Algerian economy relied on its plentiful oil and gas resources, Morocco enjoyed a phosphates boom and Egypt benefited, after the I973 war~ from soaring prices for its Sinai oil, increased remittances from its workers abroad and massive foreign aid. The present economic environment, however, is very different. The recent expansion of vocational education has taken place in the midst of a growing economic and financial crisis brought about by the world recession and inadequate domestic economic policies. The slow-down of the economy, with the resulting decrease in productive investments and budgetary resources, has had negative implications for rapidly expanding vocational education. In terms of internal efficiency, the combination of rising enrolments and budgetary constraints has led to a market deterioration of the quality of training. In terms of external efficiency, a growing number of vocational education graduates have been experiencing serious difficulties in the labour market. All three Countries have been affected by these phenomena.

In Algeria~ more than 2oo vocational training centres were built between I98I and I987 and enrolments trebled during that period (ILO/ UNDP, I987). The Ministry of Vocational Training was able to spend significant financial resources to support this impressive quantitative expansion since its share in the national budget doubled between I98I and I987. Un- fortunately, more emphasis was put on build-

ing physical facilities than on strengthening the other determinants of the quality of training such as modern equipment, consumable materials in sufficient quantity, relevant curricula and instructional materials, well-trained instructors and efficient management. This has led to a gradual deterioration of the quality of training. Moreover, the recent growth of unemployment among young people has not spared vocational education graduates, though they fare better than young people without qualifications. As early as I982, among the young unemployed in the t 5-24 year age-group, 27 per cent had received some kind of vocational training. It is feared that the situation may have worsened as youth unemployment has been increasing steadily: half of the out- of-school young people aged I5-t 9 were unemployed in t986.

In Egypt, the secondary technical schools network grew by IO per cent a year on average between I98t and I988, to the point that what was a relatively marginal component of the school system has now become a major element in the education structure (World Bank, I989). As a matter of fact, secondary technical education accounts today for 6i per cent of all secondary students. But the government has not been able to offer sufficient financing to support the rapid expansion of enrolments. Current education expenditures, other than salaries, have increased by only 3 per cent a year during the same period so that the present level of funding for maintenance of buildings and equipment and provision of instructional and consumable materials is grossly inadequate. Even though technical education has absorbed a significant share of the Ministry of Education's investment budget for primary and secondary education (45 per cent in I987, for example), the rapid expansion of enrolments has outstripped the system's capacity to build new facilities and purchase new equipment. The lack of adequate classroom and workshop space has led to overcrowding and increased student/teacher ratios, in spite of the introduction of a double-shift system. As a result, the quality of training has become very uneven.

Vocational education in Algeria, Egypt and Morocco: the crisis and its lessons 99

Furthermore, there is evidence that the demand for technicians and skilled workers is adversely affected by the current slow-down of the economy and that it has become difficult for technical-school graduates to find meaningful employment in their area of specialization.

In Morocco, following the x984 decision to expand vocational education under the National Vocational Training Agency, enroiments soared from t9,88o in the I983/84 school year to 42,36o in I987/88, which corresponds to an average annual growth rate of 2t per cent. Resources to finance this expansion were made available by raising the existing payroll tax from I per cent to 1.6 per cent. But the funds allocated were insufficient to build enough facilities to accommodate all the new students or to provide enough consumable materials for workshop practice. Ad hoc measures were taken to meet the quantitative objectives of the x984 reform, such as the introduction of a double shift in most training centres and the reliance on many under-qualified instructors. The quality of training has suffered badly from this rapid expansion, especially at the skilled- worker level (centres de qualification professionnelle). Furthermore, the slow-down of the economy has made it increasingly difficult for vocational graduates to find jobs despite evidence that the level of qualifications of the Moroccan labour force remains low (Morocco, I985). Although it is not possible to get a systematic view of the employment situation due to lack of comprehensive labour- market information, there are indications that placement rates do not exceed 50 per cent in many specializations (Salmi, 1985).

Algeria, Egypt and Morocco share other basic features which aggravate the problems of external efficiency described above. In all three countries, the recent rapid development of vocational education has taken place in the absence of targeted manpower planning to guide decisions about training specializations and numbers of trainees. Furthermore, the vocational education institutions of the three countries have been operating, in most cases, without adequate industrial linkages. In Egypt,

with the exception of twelve 'specialized schools' formerly established in co-operation with industry and a number of special ad hoc arrange- ments b~ween schools and companies, very few technical schools run by the Ministry of Education have effective links with the productive sectors, despite a legal requirement for all schools to function under the guidance of an industrial advisory council. In Morocco, the professional boards (conseits de perfection- nement) which have the responsibility to develop links between vocational centres and industry have been active in only three or four cities. Similarly, in Algeria, only a few training centres have been able to form a technical and pedagogical committee to develop institutionalized links with employers, despite official guidelines to that effect from the Ministry of Vocational Training.

Options, constraints and assumptions

In the three countries, the present vocational education crisis has placed the educational authorities in a very delicate position as they find themselves caught between conflicting social and economic objectives. From a social point of view, the three governments are committed to providing some form of vocational education to students not academically qualified to stay in the general education stream leading to university studies. As a consequence, vocational education has become supply-driven without reference to labour-market needs. Fur- thermore, the quality of training has suffered due to diminishing financial resources in the context of free education policies. If this trend were to continue in Algeria, Egypt and Morocco, it is very likely that the unchecked expansion of vocational education in response to demographic and social pressures would exacerbate the problems of limited financial resources and difficult access to employment.

From an economic standpoint, however, the allocation of resources to vocational education and the determination of eurolment levels and

IO0 ]amil Salmi

skill specializations should reflect closely the manpower needs of the productive sectors. Any plan allowing for further expansion of vocational education would be hard to justify in the present context of economic slow-down, declining job-creation rates, and increasing employment difficulties for graduates. Appar- ently, the most logical option would be to adopt a demand-driven strategy involving a drastic decrease in vocational education enrolments and the transformation of the existing, cumbersome, formal vocational education systems into more dynamic, need-responsive, non- formal institutions directly linked to the economic sectors.

Obviously, neither option is politically acceptable. Appealing as the demand option may be from an economic viewpoint, it would not respond realistically to the countries' social constraints. Similarly, the status quo approach presents risks of further deterioration of the quality of training in vocational education due to insufficient financial resources, and of rising resentment among students dissatisfied with inadequate learning conditions and poor job prospects.

The lack of easy answers to solve the dilemma raised by the vocational education crisis stems from the rigidity of the four main constraints at play: demographic growth, social demand for education, financial resources and job creation.

First, the three countries continue to experience a very rapid increase of their school- age population: the annual rate of population growth is 3.4, 2.8 and 2.5 per cent respectively in Algeria, Egypt and Morocco. This means that primary and secondary enrol- merits will continue to expand, with the resuk- hag pressure on technical and vocational education networks to find additional places for drop-outs and push-outs from the general education system. Even if effective family- planning policies were implemented in the three countries, as has begun to happen to some extent in Morocco, it would take many years to reduce the growth rate of the school- age population. In the short and medium term, the education authorities will continue to face

the consequences of rapid demographic growth in terms of school expansion requirements as long as they remain committed to providing universal basic education to all school-age children. With the Largest population of the three countries, Egypt provides a vivid illustration of the weight of demographic pressures on education: the government finds itself in a situation where it needs to build two primary schools every day just to keep up with current eurolment levels.

Second, the demographic factor is com- pounded by the strong social demand for education. Every youth dreams of obtaining a university degree of some sort, if only to be eligible for a 'good' marriage, as has become the case in Egypt. Young people are increasingly aware of the paramount importance of diplomas and certificates for access to jobs in the modern sector and the diploma disease is certainly endemic in the three countries (Dore~ I976). Students will generally prefer to attain the highest degree possible rather than settling for a less prestigious, but possibly more relevant, type of training. In Egypt, for example, high school diploma-holders whose examination scores are too low for access to the most prestigious fields such as medicine or engineering invariably choose other university fac- ulties such as humanities or theology rather than a post-secondary technical institute because they prefer a university degree to a technical qualification regardless of job prospects. Failing the opportunity to remain in the general education stream, any kind of formal training is favoured over a premature transition from school to work.

Third, it is difficult to imagine that the near- term financial situation could improve dra- matically in the three countries. Both Morocco and Egypt have been struggling to reduce their budget deficits, which represent respectively II per cent and I6 per cent of GDP. In Algeria, the I986 drop in oil prices marked the end of the era of affluence and forced the government to launch a strict adjustment programme to reduce expenditures. In the present crisis context, it is unlikely that the education auth-

Vocational education in Algeria, Egypt and Morocco: the crisis and its lessons IOI

orities could easily obtain a larger share of the national budget. Furthermore, within the education sector, it seems difficult to reallocate resources from general education to vocational education given the combined impact of the demographic factor and the social demand for higher education.

Fourth, the economic recession and the poor to moderate prospects for near-term recovery in the three countries do not offer much hope for rapid improvements in the employment situation, especially for young people. In Morocco, for instance, projections prepared in the mid-I98os indicated that the job deficit for vocational education graduates would double by r99o. There is a growing realization that graduate unemployment may not be only an accidental manifestation of short-term economic difficulties, but that it could rather become a chronic, persistent feature of middle income economies like Algeria, Egypt and Morocco, where the rate of growth of the labour force is bound to remain very high for many years under the combined effects of rapid population growth, the very youthful age structure of the population (34 per cent under I2 years of age in Egypt, 45 per cent and 41 per cent under I5 years of age respectively in Algeria and Morocco), and rising female labour-force par- ticipation rates.

When the Moroccan Government estab- fished in I975 a two-year compulsory civil service whereby all new degree-holders were required to work in the public sector (ministries or public corporations) for a very low salary, there was a general outcry and students tried very hard, albeit unsuccessfully in most cases, to evade the scheme. Since then, there has been an ironical twist of events. Faced with a diminishing budget and rising numbers of graduates, the government is exonerating more and more students from their civil service duties. But the new graduates are desperate to do their civil service in the hope that, after two years with the administration, they will be allowed to stay on the job. The November I988 riots in the streets of Algiers were without any doubt an expression of despair on the part of

thousands of youths, many of them degree- holders, who have become frustrated by the long wait for jobs. In Egypt, after twenty-five years of guaranteed employment for all degree- and diploma-holders, the government has come to realize that it could not cope anymore with the large number of applicants. The decision was made in i983 to impose a five-year waiting period in the hope that most job-seekers would be discouraged. But this measure has not been effective. It turns out that most young graduates have not been able to find a private-sector job or have elected to wait patiently five years because of the job security attached to public- sector employment. Although these examples are more impressionistic than systematic, they provide a powerful illustration of the gravity of the youth unemployment situation and its effects on people's behaviour.

And yet, even though conventional wisdom shows these constraints as representing apparently insurmountable obstacles, some qualifying observations are called for to avoid misconcep- tions about the relative importance of these issues and the real meaning of the vocational education crisis.

The first observation relates to the question of quality of training. While there is no doubt that the lack of funds to finance the equipment and consumable materials needed for workshop practice is undoubtedly a serious impediment to adequate learning, the poor quality of training in vocational education can also be attributed to four factors which are not directly related to the current crisis but are rather structural features of the system.

The first relates to the crucial question of access and recruitment criteria. In contrast to what has happened in countries like the Re- public of Korea where mechanisms have been put into place to ensure that the best students are attracted to vocational education, in Algeria, Morocco and Egypt, access to vocational education is the result of a selection 'by default' whereby only those who cannot make it to general secondary Celect' to go to vocational education. This has negative implications in terms of aptitudes and motivations.

I 0 2 Yamil Salmi

The second factor is language. In the three countries, the main vehicle of instruction for specialized technical subjects is still today the former colonial language: French in the Algerian and Moroccan cases, and English in Egypt. As a general rule, the large majority of students have an insufficient command of the foreign language in which they are being taught. Their learning capacity is therefore seriously hampered.

The low teachers' salaries represent a third issue which, though exacerbated by the present financial crisis, is a structural feature of vocational education systems due to the fact that teacher remuneration is linked to the general civil service scale instead of following industrial practices. When salaries are too low to attract and retain well-qualified teachers, the quality of training suffers from the non-availability of competent and well-motivated teachers. This is the case in the three countries, although the situation is relatively better in Algeria where wage differences between vocatioual training centres and enterprises are not too large. In Morocco, teachers' salaries are very low compared with industrial wages. As a result, the National Vocational Training Agency has not been very successful in recruiting and keeping experienced teachers. The Egyptian situation is even worse: official salaries are so low that the best teachers have left to work in the Gulf States and the remaining teachers are forced to hold down at least two jobs at the same time. Obviously, this is not an ideal formula for effective teaching.

The fourth factor is management. In the three countries, the failure to build up a strong institutional framework and administrative capacity to manage the human, physical and financial resources devoted to vocational education contributes to low internal efficiency.

Despite its apparent rigidity, the financing constraint cart also be revisited from a different perspective. The logic of rate of return analysis suggests that it would be a waste of resources to keep on investing in vocational education systems which have a low external efficiency such as those of Algeria, Egypt and Morocco.

Rather, it would be more cost-effective to re.allocate these resources to general education which, even though it does not necessarily guarantee better employment prospects in the short run, is certainly much less expensive than vocational education. This line of reasoning, however, is open to criticism. To begin with, it is a mistake to assume that a good secondary education programme, with adequate science laboratory resources, is really significantly cheaper than vocational education. Further- more, even if one were to accept that the annual cost per student is much higher in vocational education than in general education, one needs to take a dynamic view to be able to make a valid assessment. A meaningfnl comparison requires focusing on the total number of school years financed by public funds and needed by a student to finish his/her educational career. In the case of vocational education, the standard duration is usually three years. For a general education student, however, one needs to count not only three years of upper secondary but also the average number of higher education years needed to get a degree since, in Algeria, Egypt and Morocco, aU high-school graduates are entitled to pursue university studies at the state's expense, whereas the majority of vocational education graduates are expected to take up employment after graduation. In the three countries, the annual unit costs are spread out according to the following pattern: too for secondary education, 3o0 for vocational education, and 20o for higher education. Thus, while a vocational education graduate would cost approximately 9oo, a student allowed to stay in the general education track would eventually cost the state at least t,ioo. Paradoxical as it may seem, increasing vocational education enrolments might be an effective way of limiting higher education expenditure in countries where the political acceptability of selective access policies and cost-recovery measures is very remote.

Another way of looking at the financial constraint is to challenge the assumption that the present levels of public expenditure on education, representing from 2o to 30 per cent

Vocational education in Algeria, Egypt and Morocco: the crisis and its lessons 10 3

of the total budget, constitute an absolute maximum which cannot or should not be exceeded. This argument relies on two hypoth- eses which are not necessarily legitimate. First, it is postulated that existing government resources represent an optimum proportion of the national income. In reality, countries such as Morocco or Egypt have highly inequitable and inefficient taxation systems whose yield could be considerably improved with the proper political will to do so. Second, the prevailing pattern of government expenditures is viewed as an unchaUengeable norm. But there is no established theory to determine what is an acceptable or desirable share of public resources to be devoted to the education sector, including vocational education, as compared with what governments spend on military equipment or road infrastructure for instance.

The labour-market constraint is conven- tionaUy presented as the result of shortcomings of the vocational education system. Graduate unemployment supposedly finds its origin in the poor quality of training, the lack of relevance of the curricula, and the absence of adequate industrial linkages. It is assumed that improving the mode of operation of a vocational education system by remedying these aspects would automatically increase its external efficiency. This approach reflects tile human capital theory belief that access to jobs is determined exclusively by technical consider- ations on educational qualifications and poten- tial productivity. However, in countries like Algeria, Egypt and Morocco, the labour market mechanisms do not conform to this theoretical pattern.

To begin with, the oversupply of graduates has created a phenomenon of downward vertical substitution whereby, as more and more people with university degrees find it difficult to be recruited for positions compatible with their expectations, they lower their expectations and accept positions at lower levels than their academic qualifications and background alone would justify. This is triggering a qualification escalation effect inasmuch as employers tend to increase their minimum educational require-

ments, not because higher skills are needed for satisfactory performance of the tasks, but as a result of the rapid growth of a surplus market of educated individuals. Therefore, educational characteristics per se become less decisive in the process of allocation of individuals to occupations than their distribution in the labour force. In Egypt, for instance, the excess supply of engineers has brought about a trickle- down effect as engineering graduates have increasingly been accepting positions whose skill requirements could be effectively met by technicians. A similar trend has been observed in Morocco and Algeria. A comparative study prepared by the International Institute for Edu- cational Planning, which included Morocco among its six case-studies, had concluded as early as I978 that ~the educational structure of the economic branches is less the outcome of skill needs objectively defined as a function of the prevailing technological level than the result of the education policy followed, which in- fluences the supply of schooled manpower' (Caillods, I978).

Second, in the three countries, the skilled- labour market has a very low degree of insti- tutionalization, i.e. most recruitments do not take place through institutional channels such as employment agencies, placement offices in educational institutions, or newspaper adver- tisements. As a result, recruitment is rather heavily influenced by factors extraneous to the technical requirements of the positions to be filled. While having the right educational qualifications is usually a necessary condition in the present context of oversupply of graduates, it is not always the decisive criterion. More often than not, one also needs the right personal, social or political connections.

Third, there is a widespread phenomenon of horizontal substitution whereby vocational education graduates end up occupying positions not directly related to their area of training. While it is not clear whether this phenomenon is a side-effect of the vertical substitution mechanisms described earlier, or of the interference of personal recommendations and other social criteria in the recruitment process, or a corn-

10 4. yamil Salmi

bination of both, its frequent occurrence defeats the purpose of careful planning of training specializations to ensure that the output of the vocational education system corresponds to the skill needs of the economy. Evidence of horizontal substitution has been found not only in the three countries under review, but also in economies as diverse as those of I-Iong Kong, Israel, Peru and C6te d'Ivoire (Moock and Bellew, I988; Chung, I989; Grootaert, r988; Ziderman, I988).

Fourth, it is commonly assumed that economic growth introduces new production technologies which, in turn, raise the level of skills required.3 But the actual experience of countries like Algeria, Egypt and Morocco has revealed that there is no systematic pattern of increase in skill requirements. In Morocco, for example, case-studies have shown that, while there has been a qualitative change in the nature of the skills needed to perform work operations and in the way of acquiring these skills, the development of new economic activities and the transformation of existing activities can have different effects on operating skill requirements. In some cases there has been an increase in the skill level of the workers; in other cases, however, the effect has been one of polarization, with an augmentation of the proportion of unskilled jobs and a greater concentration of the technical knowledge at the higher levels of the hierarchy in the firm's division of labour (Salmi, I98I). In Egypt, it has been observed in a number of cases that the introduction of new technologies with highly automated methods of production actually led to a reduction in operating-skills requirements (World Bank, r989 ). Even in the case of the Republic of Korea, which is considered a success story in terms of economic development, the export-led strategy implemented during the I97os relied mainly on a large supply of unskilled workers with a good general education background rather than on specifically trained people, as a result of technological choices emphasizing production efficiency over technological sophis- tication (Adams, I989). Apparently, the skill impact of technological change can vary widely

under the combined influence of factors such as the rate and pattern of economic growth, the type of economic sector and branch, the technology choices of individual firms, national investment policies, the availability of subsidies in favour of or against technology transfers, the capital intensity of particular technologies, etc.

Even assuming effective measures to improve the quality and relevance of vocational education and to develop proper linkages with industry, one needs to make allowance for the existence of these phenomena which affect the relationship between training and work and which make it very difficult to adapt the output of vocational education systems to the evolving needs of the economy. The reverse implication of these findings is that good placement rates for vocational education graduates are not always a guarantee of satisfactory external efficiency. They may simply reflect high rates of job creation, in which case employers do not necessarily discriminate among graduates from different streams, as has happened in rapidly growing economies like the Republic of Korea or Israel for example, or even in Egypt during the full employment years.

Some lessons from the crisis

Algeria, Egypt and Morocco have followed substantially different development strategies during the last three decades. While Algeria has privileged industrial development emphasizing heavy, capital-intensive industries, Morocco has pursued an outward-looking strategy focusing on the promotion of agriculture, light industry and phosphate products for export. Egypt has moved over time from a centrally planned economy with a heavy industry emphasis to a more open, market-oriented and outward- looking economy. However, despite these dis- parities in economic development patterns, their vocational education experiences have been strikingly similar and they are faced with similar challenges in the context of the current vocational education crisis.

This analysis of the difficult choices con-

Vocational education in Algeria, Egypt and Morocco: the crisis and its lessons IO 5

fronting education authorities in Algeria, Egypt and Morocco suggests four lessons. First, vocational education systems should not be blamed for problems which find their origin outside the education sphere. Most of the constraints bearing upon the performance of vocational education in the three countries reviewed are beyond the control of the education authorities: rapid demographic growth, heavy social demand for education, diminishing financial resources, the pace of economic development and iob creation, and the pattern of technological change are all constraints for which there is no direct educational solution. As Levin (I98o) notes:

Educational attempts to change society tend to direct attention away from the locus of the problem by creating and legitimating the ideology that schools can be used to solve problems which did not originate in the education sector.

While the apparent signs of crisis (poor quality, insufficient funding, low external efficiency) are clear indicators of malfunctions in relation to the conventionally advocated role of vocational education systems, they are a normal and logical result of the other role being fulfilled by schools, i.e. to perform a 'social parking' ftmction.

Second, in the absence of radical reforms of the economic structure, there is no magic cure to resolve the conflicts at hand. The existing demographic, social, financial, fiscal, technological and economic constraints are so fun- damental that finding solutions which could be both economically feasible and politically acceptable is almost like attempting the im- possible. This observation applies equally to attempts to dismantle altogether secondary vocational education systems on grounds of their poor performance. Unsatisfactory as the implications of this conclusion might be, one needs to recognize the fact that only second- best options are available in the present context and only relatively marginal improvements can be envisaged. Short of being able to cut down sharply enrolments and mobilize additional resources in a substantial way, education authorities should focus on measures to bring vocational education closer to the production

sectors through local labour-market information systems, reformed curricula, stronger management and institutionalized linkages which would provide better opportunities for on-the-job training experience and financial support from industry.

Third, there is a need for an integrated approach to planning for vocational education development. Given the complex interrelation- ships between general and vocational education in terms of flows of students and resources, and the existence of conflicting social and economic objectives, it would be inappropriate to attempt to deal with vocational education issues in isolation. The education authorities should rather follow a comprehensive approach to guide decisions about quantitative expansion, quality improvements and resource allocations for the entire education sector. This would provide a common framework for the integrated development of the various components of the system: general schooling, vocational education and specialized sectoral training schemes. Measures to encourage the introduction of efficient management practices and to establish a strong network of school principals would further facilitate the implementation of this integrated development strategy.

Finally, more flexibility is required to make the vocational education systems of Algeria, Egypt and Morocco more responsive to the rapidly changing economic and social conditions. A recent review of World Bank technical and vocational education projects over the last twenty years has revealed that one of the most crucial determinants of success has been the capacity to adapt promptly to new economic and social demands (Middleton, I987). One way of achieving this result could be to move away from the traditional emphasis on specialized training toward programmes with more clustered groupings of skills. This approach would certainly be more cost-effective and more promising in terms of external efficiency. To paraphrase John Dewey, 'education is a process of living and not a preparation for future living'; vocational education should thus evolve from being a one-time mechanism to

lO6 ~amil Salmi

facilitate the initial transition from school to work, to becoming a mode of continuous training to equip yound people with competency- based transferable skills for the lifelong education process needed for a smooth adaptation to a rapidly evolving economic and technological environment. []

Notes i. The term ~vocational education' is used in this paper

as a generic expression to designate various types of secondary technical education or vocational training institutions where students are taught, in addition to general education subjects, applied science and prac- tical skills with an occupational orientation.

2. The World Bank published a paper in I986 entitled 'Education Policies for Sub-Saharan Africa' raising strong doubts about the internal and external efficiency of vocational education systems. More recently~ aWith- ering Secondary Vocational Education?' was the question debated at a World Bank seminar.

3. The technoiogical-functlonalist theory is based on the contention that modern production methods, as a result of the scientific and technical revolutions are becoming increasingly more complex and therefore require higher levels of competence and training. See, for example~ C. Kerr et al., Industrialism and Industrial Man, Cambridge, Mass.~ Harvard University Press, I96o.

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vocational education in algeria, egypt and morocco

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