An Egyptian Student in The American Classroom

“Imagination is more important than knowledge”

Albert Einstein

Perhaps nothing contrasts the radical disparity between the Egyptian and American university-level educational systems further than the above-mentioned quote. Hello all, my name is Shady Fouad; an Egyptian MBA (Masters in Business Administration) student in Georgia State University in Atlanta, USA. I am doing my Masters in two fields in parallel: Corporate Finance, and Computer Information Systems (..and yes, it is an overload as it sounds!) on the basis of a scholarship from the United States’ government. I wrote a previous article for Skill Link few months ago, and I was motivated by the unexpected responses some of the readers to write another one that sheds some abstract thoughts about the academic life in the American. This is an extremely wide domain, however, I will do my best!

In this article I will try to bestow some answers for the subsequent questions:

§         How does an American university look like?

§         Is the disparity between the two educational systems due to the availability of resources?

§         How good are our business schools?

How does an American university look like?
I am sure than many of you would like to know how does the university look like here. Well, the university here is almost something like a 5 stars hotel located in the middle of the Gezira Sporting Club. It has everything you could imagine from such a place academically and non academically.

From the academic standpoint: each classroom is outfitted with a computer, a small cinema screen for presentations and case studies, a video, a telephone, a complete sound system, and overhead projector. Additionally, the library has all sorts of information and references you could ever think of.

From the non-academic standpoint: it is arduous to declare all the services provided, because everyday I discover a new service that I haven’t been aware of.  For example, we have a cinema, two 8 floors buildings for physical fitness, including all the necessary equipment, housing facilities, transportation facilities (the university has it’s own transportation system), a well-equipped clinic, restaurants, conference halls, career placement services, academic assistance (where each student is formally assigned a professor for solving any problems the student might have), recreation services, and so forth. It is important to mention that each of the abovementioned items provides its own wide spectrum of activities. For instance, the sports arena provides scuba diving lessons (along with the equipment of course – all free of charge), sailing lessons in Georgia’s wonderful lakes, skiing trips, diet programs, health monitoring services, etc.

The computer labs equipped are with the latest technologies (not computers only) such as color laser jets, scanners, and audiovisual equipment that are opened 24 hours per day, 365 days per year We connect here to the internet using a T1 connection (about 100 Kb per second transfer rate, versus 5.5 kb for the conventional phone line). Therefore, almost any kind of activity you might think of will be sponsored by the university, which makes it the favorite place to spend your time all day long.

Is the disparity between the two educational systems due to the availability of resources?
Now I will shift to the paramount line of reasoning that I want to convey to the reader, which is that the disparity between the two systems, is not exclusively credited to luxury or resources’ abundance. Yes, the availability of resources is a crucial factor, but it is certainly not the supreme factor.

The overall tuition fees of my university are estimated at some US$ 45,000. From my first hand experience, I came to believe that a noteworthy portion of the tuition fees is allocated towards maintaining the facilities and luxuries provided to students, rather than the core of the educational process itself.

Georgia State University, like almost all American universities provides an outstanding level of luxury for its students. It is almost impossible to make a comparison between Cairo University and Georgia State University in that regards. Therefore, despite of this shocking figure, I profoundly disagree with those who impugn the magnitude of the malfunctions of our system to the deficiency of funds. Instead, I assign it to the radical diversion between both teaching philosophies, and the number of students.

In Egypt the focal point of our system is how to absorb and understand the theory under study. In the United States on the other hand, their genuine concern is oriented towards how to apply the theory. Perhaps this justifies why on relative terms, we might have more PhD graduates than them as a percentage of the overall number of students. Our system yields scientists on papers, while their system yields businessmen and professionals.

Let me highlight my argument with the following  example: I had statistics classes in Egypt and in USA. In Egypt, I was taught how to calculate the mean, standard deviation, percentiles, and so forth. However, in the USA the center of attention was not on how to calculate them, instead, the focus was on how to use them and what to do with those figures.

As a consequence of the above-mentioned example I had to go to the exam with a calculator in Egypt, trying to memorize as much equations as I could, and since I’m terribly awful at memorizing by nature the only logical result was succeeding by a miracle.  In the United States on the contrary, the professor allowed us to use computers in the exam to make our calculations.

The exam was a case study about the claim that a certain safety device was not effective to handle a particular kind of vehicle accidents. We were to act as the defense advocate on the behalf of our corporation, where we had to develop our own theory of what has really happened through utilizing the given facts, and then prove our arguments statistically, taking into consideration the possibilities of other factors such as sabotage and negligence.

The phantom that the above-mentioned exam was stressing is simple: There is nothing called “statistics” alone. Statistics is one of the tools that revolve within an orbit consisting of other sciences such as the behavioral sciences in order to become the bedrock of the experiences of the future manager. This manager in turn will be capable of integrating the given facts in a highly developed web of logical arguments that collectively sculpt a sophisticated model that is optimized for decision-making.

Professors here try to be as adjacent to reality as much as possible. In the economics class for instance, the subscription in Business Week and the Financial Times was a mandatory part of the course. I remember having a one-week take home exam where we had to furnish our meticulous analysis of the current status of the economy, and our recommendations on how to solve those problems.

The American educational system has been developed on the notion that the orthodox universities’ formal structures are not chiseled in stone and that the only constant in this life is change itself. Hence, they always try to challenge their current approaches in order to sustain a flawless performance in an ever-changing world.

Universities were evolved in order to satisfy the needs of the business organizations. Therefore the business organizations are the authentic clients of the university. This leads to the simple sound fact that the crucial role of the university should be cementing the student’s skills, rather than testing his ability to memorize a book.

One might ask: “…and why should the university care for the business needs, especially if it’s a governmental entity?”. Well, the answer is simple. Competition here is a life style in the USA. There is a zero tolerance policy for any incompetent person or entity. This applies for governmental entities as well as private ones. The university is not guaranteed funding. All governmental universities here compete upon the Federal Government’s funds. The funds are allocated in accordance with the school’s ranking. The school with the highest ranking gets the lion’s share of funds, which in turn reflects on the salaries of the professors and staff. Additionally, large corporations provide academic funds and donations that are based upon the school’s ranking.

Georgia State was ranked the 11^th top university in the United States in the field of Computer Information Systems (by USNEWS.COM 2001), and therefore it was awarded a $1 million fund for purchasing new state of the art computers. The blue-chip corporations here exercise a deeply embedded influential role in the academic system, and in many instances, the corporations communicate with the university directly in order to establish a certain course to fit the needs of the corporation in this expertise.

It is needless to mention that the survival of the professors in the university is hanging upon on their quality of education and their competence, which is in turn evaluated on the basis of their innovation and their publications. Hence, you are evaluated on what you know, not what your certificates say. I am sure that some of you might be astonished to know that most of the professors in the American universities do not hold a PhD degree. This is because they are industry professionals, with an incontrovertible track record of achievements. This semester I enjoyed the lectures of a rocket scientist who used to develop missile guidance software for NASA space program and the US army.

In many cases, my professor was the author of the book I was studying. Additionally, some professors invite industry professionals to lecture about the latest developments in the field. Due to the above-mentioned competition, each professor has an ultimate interest in the superiority of his teaching style. Therefore many professors use very untraditional techniques in order deviate away from the orthodox teaching techniques.

America is blessed with its multicultural diversity, which provides it with ample schools of thought that are skimmed from the best of the best from all over the world. This diversity creates a continuous stream of cultural frictions that only leads to the domination of the finest set of ideas and judgments.  There are professors from German, English, Indian, Russian, Iranian, Danish, and Egyptian origins for example. Each of them is one of the unique talents in his domain.

In each course I had, there must have been at least one team project and one individual project. Those projects are the way to bridge the gap between the theory and practice. Those projects are based on real case studies, and they face exactly the challenges that are in real life.  I remember once I had a problem with my group because they were not working as they should and the professor replied that I should consider myself in a real life situation and that I had to use what I took in human resources management to deal with them!

The assigned projects are quite challenging and actually some professors borrow problems from corporations. In some cases, the representatives of those corporations attend the students’ presentations and listen to the solutions they have provided. In many instances, is quite possible for students to be hired on the spot once a student proves to be exceptionally talented.

I remember having an e-commerce web development project that has been dreadfully stimulating. The professor informed us that he has started an application from scratch many years ago and that every year, he splits his class into teams. Each year those teams complete a module of the application, and hence, throughout the years, the application became quite large. This application has been virtually created by hundreds of students all working in harmony in cyber space with the professor providing guidance and linkage between the different teams (in different countries!) in order to interface the different modules. It was such a sense of achievement to know that you’re contributing to an application that might be operational one day as a commercial package.  This is a truly multinational project with students from USA, France, Mexico, Denmark, India, Thailand, Taiwan, and Egypt (yeah..it was I!).

There is a famous TV program here called Robot Wars, where engineering students design and manufacture robots with the sole purpose of fighting other robots manufactured by the students from other universities. The blue-chip corporations sponsor those matches, and the funds go to research and development.  As you can see, this makes studying a pleasure and real fun rather than just a boring theoretical thing.

How good are our business schools?

I have graduated from the Faculty of Commerce, English Section – Cairo University in 1997. Therefore I do not have a good idea how it looks like right now, but I will talk about it from my own point of view since I was there.

The English Section is our true hope for catching up with the educational systems of developed countries. The quality of education I have received there has been without doubt a bedrock of knowledge that has allowed me to flourish here. It has supplied me with an unbeatable academic infrastructure that proved to be up to the challenges of the American system.

The English Section started with the right start:

§         Limited number of highly qualified students.

§         Respect for the student.

§         Latest American and British books.

§         An innovative syllabus (by the Egyptian standards).

§         Enormous computer labs.

§         Highly motivated professors.

However, when I left things were turning gloomy:

§         Unlimited number of students.

§         A very static syllabus.

§         Students were denied access to the computer labs, and of course all of them became obsolete.

§         A spiral decline of innovation and innovation in the section.

§         Burocracy and traditional Egyptian managerial problems.

§         Absence of new specializations desperately needed by the business settings in Egypt, such as Corporate Finance.

I still have hope that the English Section will one day restore its initial spirit, despite of my pessimism. Few weeks ago, Georgia State University has awarded me the membership of the honor society of the academically talented students in the United States. If this signifies something, it signifies that I am a product of the current Egyptian academic system. Therefore if this system has prepared me to reach where I am now, then I am sure that it is capable of producing generations and generations of top-notch professionals. I am not the brightest or the smartest of all students, and hence, I am positive that other Egyptian students could do as much as I did, if not better if they are given the right chance.

I believe that the optimal solution for the problems in our university-level educational system could be summarized in one word: “privatization”. I think that the government should advocate the establishment of private universities though multiple ways (such as tax breaks) in order to alleviate the escalating pressures on the public ones. I know we already have private universities; but the tuition costs of the absolute majority of them are way beyond the wildest dreams of the average Egyptian family that was once capable of sponsoring private high school education for their kids.

I know some might question the fairness of the process on the assumption that some of those private universities could “sell” the certificate. Well, this is a plausible rationale, however, history has taught us that the market forces are capable of severely punishing any university that acts in that irresponsible manner. It is only a matter of time, and the negative reputation will drive it out of business. Let them compete and survival will be for the fittest!

Final Words..

I have written two articles for Skill Link so far. Those articles require a relentless effort and consume a great deal of time. One of the questions I asked myself while writing this article was: “Why am I writing it?” I guess I didn’t have a persuasive answer until I finished.  The answer is as follows:

We must have hope and dreams of a better tomorrow. The English Section has been an idea one day, and eventually someone had to go against the tide and all though the numerous obstacles until it became a concrete reality.  I don’t know who he is or how he looks like, but I hope that he knows that his idea has inspired hundreds of young students, and that some of those students became shining stars in the United States and Europe. This article is my humble way of saying “Thank you” to him, and everyone else who sincerely helped me and other Egyptians to succeed here in these unmercifully competitive lands.

Others have helped me, and therefore it’s my turn to continue the path and to help others as much as I can. Therefore if there is anything I could do to help you, please let me know.

My contact info is: 

Shady H Fouad
70, 12^th Street NE
Midtown Business District
Atlanta, GA 30309
Tel: +1 (404) 733 5642

Email: ShadyMBA@yahoo.com