Private Higher Education

NUMBER 56, SUMMER 2009

Iran’s Giant Semiprivate Unversity

Shahrzad Kamyab
Shahrzad Kamyab is an international education consultant in San Diego, California. E-mail: Shahrzad.kamyab@yahoo.com.

In 1983, the new Islamic regime in Iran permitted the founding of a nongovernmental, nonprofit university, called the Islamic Azad University. Azad was the first nongovernmental university to be created after the Iranian revolution of 1979. Although the university began with only a handful of students and a small location, it has now become one of the largest universities in Iran. It took several years for Azad’s degrees and programs to gain the approval of the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology, and as a result, Azad did not establish itself as a respected higher education institution in Iran until the late 1980s. Conventionally, only those Iranian institutions approved by the Ministry of Higher Education possess higher status and prestige. Consequently, Azad now is enjoying a higher prestige than during the early years of its inception. Now enrolling a record 1.3 million students, Azad is educating approximately 50 percent of the total student population in Iran.

The Creation of Azad
Azad literally means “free” in Persian. However, in the case of Azad, it also means “open access,” and the university promotes itself as the alternative to the ultracompetitive national universities. While this spotlight might imply absence of criteria for admission, Azad does in fact use an entrance exam. However, to gain entrance to Iran’s public universities, students must pass a more rigorous and difficult exam Thus, Azad attracted large numbers of applicants, including those who were denied access because of low scores to the public universities.

Azad University was supported by the former Iranian government administration, and the idea was initiated by the former president, Hashemi Rafsanjani himself. Such a university was established to alleviate the ever-increasing demand for higher education among high school graduates denied access to public universities due to the limited number of seats and stringent entrance examinations. Maintained not by government support but by the tuition and fees it collects from its students, Azad must charge high fees and cast its nets widely enough to obtain students who might otherwise apply to public universities. Students willingly pay the high tuition because a university degree in Iran disproportionately improves social and professional status and mobility. (The public universities, in contrast, levy no fees on their students.)

Azad’s Administrative Structure
Yet, in spite of the fact that Azad is not government subsidized, it is still not considered a “private” institution. Instead, it is considered semiprivate, since its degree programs are overseen by the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology. In Iran, no institution of higher education is permitted to function independent of the ministry’s rules and regulations. Consequently, Azad’s curriculum is similar to that of public universities and the scope of academic freedom compares to that allowed at public universities. Azad’s instructors may supplement the prescribed curriculum by using outside instructional materials. Azad has both part-time and full-time faculty with 15,000 full-time faculty at its branches.

The administrative structure of Azad University also differs from public universities. The university is run by several councils, the highest and most important one being the supreme council. The supreme council is the main decision maker concerning university policies and is responsible for the appointment of president and approval of the budget.

Importantly, Azad is a multicampus university with over 300 physical branches inside Iran and another five campuses outside Iran in the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, Lebanon, Tanzania, and Armenia. The students who attend branches outside Iran are both Persian and foreign nationals; however, since the language of instruction is Persian, the applicants must demonstrate mastery of language as a prerequisite for admission. In general, the mission of campuses outside Iran was to promote the Persian language and culture. The multiple branches within Iran were established to make higher education accessible in rural areas remote from the traditional centers of higher education in Iran. In this way, students from the provinces are able to avoid dormitory expenses, by living at home.

In addition, Azad was instrumental to economic development in Iran, as it created a multitude of new jobs in a variety of fields: Azad not only employed scholars and administrators to teach and run the university at its many branches but also required skilled and unskilled laborers to build and service its facilities. These newly created jobs and Azad’s more lenient admissions policies have mobilized populations around the country, leading to a wave of migration that reversed the trend of the 1960s and 1970s, when moving from the provinces to the major cities was the way to facilitate improved educational and employment opportunities. Now, potential Azad employees and students are leaving the cities to work and study at Azad branches around the country.

Results of Azad‘s Creation
Although the creation of Islamic Azad University was a positive step to accommodate the needs of the higher education seekers in Iran, its creation may have further contributed to the “diploma disease” or “chase for diploma” phenomenon in Iran. Iranian high school graduates seek higher education, as parents dream that their children will gain elevated status as professionals, especially in the field of medicine or engineering.

While the establishment of such a university further democratized university admissions by offering a more relaxed entrance examination than the public universities require, Azad’s fees are an obstacle for many Iranians. The creation of Azad University has alleviated the pressure on public universities to supply a growing youth population with higher degrees (there are currently three million university students in Iran), but since the economy has been characterized by a high unemployment rate (11%) graduates of Azad cannot be guaranteed to have a better chance of finding employment than graduates from public universities (1 out of 10 unemployed holds a university degree).

Moreover, Azad focuses purely on meeting the growing need for university degrees and does not provide its graduates with professional career counseling (higher education institutes in Iran lack career-planning services). Therefore, many students after graduation may not possess a clear idea of what they can do with their university degrees. As the brain drain persists in Iran, perhaps many of Azad’s graduates leave the country to pursue advanced degrees or work abroad.

[Online] Available: http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/soe/cihe/newsletter/Number56/p15_Kamyab.htm