The state of some of Africa's once-fine universities is highlighted in a New York Times article titled "Africa’s Storied Colleges, Jammed and Crumbling". It's not encouraging reading, and it's not a situation that will be remedied soon. But, as journalist Lydia Polgreen points out: "The disarray of Africa’s universities did not happen by chance." Africa's universities and students are paying the price for the mismanagement of governments, a situation aggravated by the policies of the World Bank and IMF.
"In the 1960s, universities were seen as the incubator of the vanguard that would drive development in the young nations of newly liberated Africa, and postcolonial governments spent lavishly on campuses [but as] idealistic postcolonial governments gave way to more cynical and authoritarian ones, universities, with their academic freedoms, democratic tendencies and elitist airs, became a nuisance. ... When the World Bank and International Monetary Fund came to bail out African governments with their economic reforms... higher education was usually low on the list of priorities. Fighting poverty required basic skills and literacy, not doctoral students ... .
"Far from being a tool of social mobility, the repository of a nation’s hopes for the future, Africa’s universities have instead become warehouses for a generation of young people for whom society has little use and who can expect to be just as poor as their uneducated parents." Read full NY Times article...
"In the 1960s, universities were seen as the incubator of the vanguard that would drive development in the young nations of newly liberated Africa, and postcolonial governments spent lavishly on campuses [but as] idealistic postcolonial governments gave way to more cynical and authoritarian ones, universities, with their academic freedoms, democratic tendencies and elitist airs, became a nuisance. ... When the World Bank and International Monetary Fund came to bail out African governments with their economic reforms... higher education was usually low on the list of priorities. Fighting poverty required basic skills and literacy, not doctoral students ... .
"Far from being a tool of social mobility, the repository of a nation’s hopes for the future, Africa’s universities have instead become warehouses for a generation of young people for whom society has little use and who can expect to be just as poor as their uneducated parents." Read full NY Times article...
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