Africa's Push-Pull Factors - or Is
It Pull-Push?
Influences on African Students'
Decisions to Study in the United States
By Nancy Keteku
Nancy Keteku is the educationUSA
Regional Educational Advising Coordinator for sub-Saharan Africa
Whether
recruiting or evaluating applicants from overseas, we find ourselves asking,
"What made this student decide to apply to this particular school?" Or, "How can I attract good students from Africa to my school?" This
article explores the factors that push students to leave their home countries
and pull them to study in the United States, focusing particularly on shifts in the last few years.
Over the past decade, the number
of sub-Saharan African students in the United States has more than doubled, to 32,800 in 2005-6, constituting 6 percent
of the world's total and rising faster than any other region. This is
impressive, considering that U.S.
education is expensive and African countries number among the world's poorest. What influences African students' decisions
to study in the U.S., and how can international educators continue to attract them?
The Push
Factor
First of all, the "push
factor" is a strong current running throughout Africa, stronger in some
countries than others. Asked their primary reason for seeking higher education
abroad, African students will most often cite the poor quality of the education
system at home, followed by a long litany of complaints that stem from a single
source: underfunding. Take strikes, for example. In
some countries it is hard to imagine an academic year being completed on time.
A Sierra Leonean newspaper in 1994 quoted a university administrator on the regularity
of strikes: "During the first term, the students go on strike; second
term, it's the junior staff, and then third term the senior staff take their
turn."
During the last five years, as
fee-free primary and secondary education has been introduced, school
enrollments have mushroomed, leading to predictions that Kenya,
for example, will need 40,000 additional university places before the end of
the decade. This year, Kenya proposes expanding university admissions by 60 percent, to 16,000 –
but it takes an A-/B+ average to be admitted, leaving many qualified students
disappointed. In Francophone countries, all students who pass the formidable Baccalaureat exams at the end of secondary school
are automatically admitted to universities, and some are still paid stipends
that serve as a disincentive to graduation, resulting in overcrowding that
boggles the imagination. In the few Anglophone universities that provide
residential accommodation, rooms designed for one or two students now sleep as
many as a dozen, some legal and others "perching," as it's called in
Ghana, where "in-out-out-in" schemes have been adopted to allocate
rooms only to freshmen and seniors.
Overcrowding and underfunding mean that students must arrive at lectures
hours early to secure seats. Photocopiers supply more materials than libraries
can, with reports that fighting over scarce books at Ethiopian universities is
not uncommon. Internet labs and cafes, the products of private enterprise,
spring up like mushrooms, spelling salvation for aspiring scholars but not
bridging the knowledge gap.
Whispers – and sometimes more
audible groans – of corruption in university admissions persist in many
countries. One suspects that the rumors are more robust than the actuality, but
the rumors reflect a mindset that is hard to counter. Did officials in Cameroon
really lower the nation's passing grade on the Baccalaureat
in order to admit the Minister's daughter? Why was a student with mediocre
grades admitted to electrical engineering when his straight-A classmate was
assigned to agricultural mechanization? Is it true that members of one ethnic
group or political party enjoy open-door admissions to the medical school? So
the rumors swirl, undermining trust and making the Registrar's work even
harder.
Political pressure compounds the
problem, pushing scholars out of their countries, especially in Eritrea,
DR Congo, and Zimbabwe. However, extreme politics have also produced some of the most
admirable scholars we have ever met; deprivation somehow clarifies people's
goals and builds their courage and determination. We marvel at the resilience
of these students, who persist in finding paths to learning.
One of the hardest put-downs
African students have to face is the arbitrary assignment of majors. "I
applied to study finance, but they gave me philosophy and archaeology
instead," is a complaint we hear: places in the more desirable finance
major fill quickly and students with the highest school-leaving exam grades
relegate others to areas where demand is lower.
The Pull
Factor
But negative scenes at home
aren't sufficient to propel students; they have to be convinced that the grass
is greener on the other side. This is where the "pull factor" comes
in.
Funding
The supreme attraction for
African students to the United
States is – you
guessed it – money. The United States is the only country whose universities
award funding on a significant scale without government intervention. Canadian,
Australian, and British education may be less expensive, but many African
students cannot afford to pay even the lower costs of tuition in these
countries where scholarships are rare. Those who don't have wealthy (and
generous) uncles have no choice but to gear up for the challenge of admission
with funding at U.S. institutions, which can be five to ten times more competitive than
admission without funding. It's tricky for international students to grasp the
concept of need-based, partial financial aid, but the neediest students catch
on fast.
In many ways, the State
Department's EducationUSA Advising Centers are becoming a niche
operation, mainly attracting the most honest, needy, and hardworking students
who have no money and therefore must apply to U.S.
schools that offer full funding. Advising centers offer what this group needs:
intensive, objective, comprehensive guidance, maximizing their ability to
compete successfully for admission with funding. In contrast, competent
students whose parents can afford to pay at least $15,000 a year have many
options, and may look for shortcuts offered by commercial agents or simply
depend on relatives and friends to make their decisions for them.
Because many students have no
choice but to sell their academic potential to the highest bidder, full
scholarships offered by China, Russia, Gulf states,
and other countries ranging from Hungary
to Singapore also attract thousands of applicants. China and
Russia award one hundred scholarships a year to Zambians, for example, and
even Malaysia stages college fairs in Lusaka. Students
complain that the United
States offers very
little in terms of government scholarships (the Fulbright being the chief
example, but with fewer than five scholarships per year in most African
countries, it is merely a drop in the bucket). What advisors try to teach these
students is that tens of thousands of U.S.
scholarships are available to those willing to do the hard work involved in the
application process.
So money, or America's
unique approach to financial aid, is the number one pull factor. But what else
appeals to African students?
Freedom to
Choose
The initial attraction to U.S.
higher education for African students is expressed in terms of facilities:
"I want to go to America because they have big libraries, acres of computers, and
ultra-equipped labs." African students especially relish the prospect of
rolling up their sleeves and getting practical experience or doing their own
research. When we tell them that Harvard's endowment alone is greater than the
combined endowments of all the universities in the UK, they
listen. When we tell them that American universities spent $43 billion on
research last year, more than the economies of many African countries, they
listen. And they want to be part of this wealth.
As they learn more about what
the United States has to offer, African students develop an appetite for academic
freedom: access and choice, two luxuries they never imagined gaining for
themselves. The ability to choose a major, to choose which courses to take, to
design one’s own independent studies, and to call one’s own shots can be a
transformative experience for students. These are powerful pull factors for the
more sophisticated of potential applicants.
Students marvel at the prospect
of being able to choose their majors freely in the United States, with the chance to explore for a year before declaring. They
further revel in the idea of college offering a clean slate, whereby students
can delve into new fields that they did not study in secondary school. American
recruiters can capitalize on this by emphasizing the freedom of choice and the
openness of all majors to all students.
U.S. schools like to advertise small classes and close relationships
with professors, but African students don't respond to these lures until they
have experienced them; these are alien concepts to students who have been
conditioned to fending for themselves, in schools where teacher attention is
best avoided. By their second year, however, they rave about their professors
and the potential unleashed through their support.
Many students have a hard time
expressing it, but they're looking for greater challenge. They know something
is missing, that their intellectual curiosity is not satisfied, and the more
they learn about U.S. higher education, the more they see its potential to open up their
minds. This is particularly true of students who want to integrate disparate
fields of study; as one Ghanaian student put it, "I was accepted into
medical school at home, but I wanted more: I wanted to double major in
biochemistry and music, and take dance and education courses." She is now
a pediatrician with a research specialization in sickle cell anemia.
Other pull factors that attract
African students to the United States include the opportunity to work, the
human diversity, a solid grounding in English language according great
advantage to their careers back home, the potential for lifelong networks for
professional development and business, the exposure to entrepreneurship, the
opportunity to develop leadership skills and (although we're loathe to admit
it) the potential for permanent immigration and a more comfortable life. That America
is the greatest meritocracy on earth is, in the final analysis, the most
powerful "pull" of all.
The Other
Side of the Coin
While "push-pull"
attracts African students to the United States, many are torn by the "pull-push" dilemma: the positive
"pull" of staying home and the negative "push" against
venturing abroad.
The most positive-minded students
realize that by leaving home, especially for undergraduate study, they will
sacrifice opportunities to create local networks and to position themselves for
future careers. Those who have more ambition than courage may decide to stay
home and become big fish in smaller ponds. For the practical-minded, the low
cost of studying at local universities is significant: in most countries, the
comprehensive cost of a year's study is less than the airfare to the United States.
Staying home keeps students
close to their families; the prospect of "uprooting myself
from everything I've ever loved" gave considerable pause to an African
student bound for the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. For the fathers of young women, marriage options
are a major issue (not so for their mothers, who passionately support their
daughters' decisions to study abroad, trusting marriage to take care of
itself). In short, wise students recognize that study abroad carries the risk
of changing their identity. Returning home with an American accent is frowned
upon almost everywhere in Africa, with such people regarded as sellouts.
Meeting
Demand at Home and on the Continent
The rapid expansion of higher
education opportunities in African countries has given students more options
than ever before. Africa's public universities are growing as fast as they can; the growth
is uneven and emphasizes quantity over quality, but students are rushing
through doors that are now open to them. Uganda pioneered
the concept of 'cost-sharing' (a euphemism for tuition payments) for students
who would previously have been denied admission, and was able to double faculty
salaries and student enrollment in one fell swoop. Part-time graduate programs,
such as executive MBA programs, have caught on like wildfire, cutting the
opportunity cost and increasing return on investment. Ten years ago these
programs were barely respected, but now their graduates carry clout in business
circles.
Private universities, as well as
tertiary-level non-degree programs, are opening at an astonishing rate as
governments pass legislation and set up accreditation boards to supervise this
long-needed development. In Ethiopia,
nearly a quarter of all postsecondary students are now enrolled in private
institutions, without a penny in government subsidies, up from zero a decade
ago. These universities charge about $10 per credit hour. At the same time, Ethiopia
has established 11 new public universities. Private universities are more
responsive to the market, and offer the majors in highest demand (business and
information technology), for which people are willing to pay market prices.
Tuition, usually pegged at $2,000-$4,000 per year, is adequate to balance budgets,
although institutional investors, often religious bodies or private business
leaders, provide the capital. A visit to African university websites,
especially the private ones, reveals their pride in listing the different
nationalities represented on campus. Public acceptance of private universities,
while initially slow, has rapidly accelerated, especially for those with
genuine links to North American or Western European academia. Examples of these
include Suffolk
University in Senegal, ABTI
American University in Nigeria,
and Ashesi
University in Ghana.
Africans have long traveled
within Africa in search of education, starting 500 years ago at the famed
university at Timbuktu in northern Mali. From the 1920s, when British and French colonial masters decreed
that only a handful of universities were needed for the entire continent, to
today, with countries such as Ghana, Senegal, Uganda and South Africa becoming
magnets or havens for aspiring students, African unity is promoted through
educational exchange.
The United Nations University network has established schools
such as the Regional Institute of Population Studies at the University of Ghana, to
serve regional needs. The University
of Ghana, now 60 years old, is committed to
enrolling 10 percent of its student body from outside Ghana:
Nigerians and Americans are the two largest groups. Exchange programs take
French majors from Ghana to Senegal, and English majors from Niger to Nigeria.
While waiting for their universities to be built, Gambians forged agreements
with Nigerian universities and Malians went to Cote D'Ivoire. Kenyans who prefer the A-level system go to school in Uganda. South Africa is the strongest magnet, offering high quality at low cost,
especially to citizens of neighboring SADC (Southern African Development
Community) countries. South
Africa's MBA
programs at universities such as Witwatersrand and Cape Town attract students from dozens of countries.
Mozambican parents feel safer sending their children to neighboring South Africa where they can keep an eye on them, although Angolans are more
likely to study in Portugal.
The expansion of educational
opportunities within Africa has radically altered people's options for higher
education, particularly for the so-called ‘middle group’ – average students who
a decade ago couldn't get any kind of university admission at home and
therefore turned to the U.S. – seeking the least expensive colleges and
patching together unreliable financing from shaky sources. Those who managed to
convince Consular Affairs to issue them visas often landed on college doorsteps
pleading poverty and falling into arrears before dropping out. Although such
students still show up, many more of them are now staying home.
Hurdles to
U.S. Study
What pushes students away from U.S.
study, discouraging them from applying? Cost and complexity.
Students and their families need in-depth advising in order to plan their
finances adequately, a responsibility that dominates much of EducationUSA's advising process. Partial financial aid that
can't begin to close the gap is particularly frustrating: "Don't they
realize that I can't afford to pay $15,000 any more than I can afford to pay
$30,000?" Students are desperate for accurate information about costs and
the availability of aid, which should be plastered across the front page of
every international admissions website.
Moreover, many students are
overwhelmed by the complexity of choices and decisions generated by an
educational system with 3,600 institutions and 17 million students – especially
hard for those who come from countries with only one university. The holistic
application process is confusing to students accustomed to their national
examination grades being the sole determinant, and standardized testing
compounds the frustration because it is inaccessible, expensive, and culturally
alien. If U.S. schools could take one step to make themselves more attractive to
international students, it would be to simplify their application process and
require testing only when the score is truly essential to the admissions
decision.
Many people believe that visas
constitute a barrier to U.S. admissions. To this we note that visa issuance rates in Africa have always been among
the lowest in the world, with the result that it didn't get any tougher after
9/11. In several African countries, we see F-1 visa issuance rates below 20
percent, a travesty by any definition. Yet our EducationUSA
advising centers report that students who use their services enjoy 95 percent
visa issuance, a clear sign that well-prepared students can get visas. F-1
visas issued to sub-Saharan African countries increased by 1 percent last year,
to 11,655.
What's Next?
In conclusion, this article
attempts to sensitize international educators to the issues that influence
African students' decisions, so that they can open their doors wider to people
who will enrich American educational institutions. Future articles will discuss
individual countries, financing approaches, and resources for credential
evaluation. Questions and comments are welcome: keteku@africaonline.com.gh.
Editor’s note : This is the first in a series of occasional papers
authored by Regional Educational Advising Coordinators and other educationUSA employees. The series will explore factors promoting
and hindering academic flows between the United States and different regions of the world.