Syria & Resources:
Misallocated Funding
Monetary resources also present an obstacle to women’s access to quality education in Syria. This is especially true at the tertiary level, where enrollment tripled between 1995 and 2005, but Syria’s expenditure on these free-tuition public university only increased by 25 percent (Kabbani 106). Additionally, in 2006 Syria had a higher student-to-teacher ratio than the majority of its Arab neighbors (Kabbani 107). In fact, in 2010, Syrians responded that the “inadequately educated workforce” was the biggest obstacle to doing business (Dervis 314). This could be due to the fact that the same study rated Syria in last place for the “extent of staff training” for higher education, and very low on the “quality of the educational system” as a whole (Dervis 315). However, the Ba’ath party’s social contract with the Syrian people included their emphasis on making education attainable. Therefore, it is not necessarily access to primary education that is an obstacle for Syrian girls: it is the quality of the education they receive there, which, as previously examined, is likely to be the only schooling they ever attend. Though teachers at each level are required to have certain competencies, their job performance is poorly monitored by educational advisors, whose visits are “very infrequent, no more than once or twice a year, and they often do not provide objective remarks” (UNESCO World Data on Education).
Furthermore, it can be seen that the educational process in Syria may contribute to higher rates of repetition or drop-outs: acceptance to state-funded university programs is based solely on the scores of the national exam taken at the end of the secondary level, and the “[s]election of field of specialization is highly dependent on the grades received during the secondary school national exam, often with little regard to personal aptitudes (students with the highest scores select medicine, those with the second highest scores select engineering, etc.)” (Kabbani 107). As a result, these university students usually have little prior knowledge about their concentrations, since the selection is based on their test scores; “[t]his results is a lot of repetition and high dropout rates increasing the government financial burden” (Kabbani 107).
All of the effects of misallocated or inefficient resources have an impact on girls’ access to education because it reduces quality and can increase cost either directly on families or indirectly, through taxes. However, it is important to note that:
many efforts have been initialized in Syria in an attempt to develop the existing education system and to harmonize it with today’s global education standards and market place. These are actually trying to provide students with access to sources of information, where learning becomes student-centered and allows each learner to construct his own understanding of concepts instead of rote memorization of facts. (Kabbani 113)
Combined with Syria’s high rate of enrollment in primary school, this is an encouraging step for Syrian women’s access to education at this level. However, the lack of government spending on higher education, low female enrollment in the secondary and tertiary levels, as well as low female participation in the workforce, mean that more government investment could reduce the number of female dropouts, by making an education eventually more profitable than a marriage.