In September 2014, Egyptian president Abd el-Fattah al-Sisi issued a decree to establish the advisory council of Egypt's scientists and experts, a presidential board that aims to provide advisory opinion on improving education and scientific research. The board announced that it is “exploring to implement a new system for free education in the next academic year.” Made of 11 members, the council is the first of its kind and all of its members are university professors: five of them are professors at the American University of Cairo, while the others work as language professors in Egypt’s public universities and research institutions. The recent proposal specifically deals with higher education and stipulates that enlistment in the 20 public universities in Egypt would give scholarships to the accepted students. This guarantees fully free education for excellent students granted they achieve good results during the academic year. In case students don’t get good results, they will have to pay part of the tuition on their own, and students who fail will have to pay the entire tuition fee. The proposal adds that the scholarship reform will financially help the universities by providing them with the money necessary for buying modern technology.
English
Free Public Education in Egypt for the happy few

Articles from Egypt
Egypt's Informal Settlements: Soldiers, Gangs, Poverty, and Construction
In 2008, the number of people living in informal settlements or slums in Egypt grew to 15 million; the equivalent of 40% of the urban population in Egypt. In fact,...
Egypt's Resources Are Not for Its People: Who Controls Them?
With their competitive advantages, namely their low prices, the materials produced by the military establishment’s factories have topped sales in all Egyptian governorates, revealing the growing economic influence of the...
El-Sissi and Resource Management in Egypt
Under the pretext of the weakness and flaccid structures of the state's civil institutions and their inefficiency compared with the military establishment and its various agencies, Egyptian President Abdelfattah el-Sissi...
From the same author
First, They Came for the Islamic Modernists:Book Burning in Cairo
Islam and and the Foundations of Governance, by Ali Abdel Raziq. Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, the biography by Uthman Amin. The Method of Islamic Reform, by former head of Al-Azhar University...
Politicizing Education
On 27 January, 2015, UNESCO held the Regional Conference for the Arab States on Education Post-2015 in the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh. This conference was in preparation for...