Education Issues in Uganda

I was talking with a teacher about problems with the education system in Uganda, comparing them with education issues in the United States. He gave some interesting insights that I figure I would share. I am clearly not an expert on the topic and only know how to talk about these issues skin-deep. Someone who has more expertise on Ugandan education than me or anyone else who disagrees can feel free to critique. I am mostly summarizing points made by a teacher. A little context, the teacher teaches at the secondary school here. There are three schools on Cornerstone’s property here: a primary, a secondary, and then advanced leadership school (advanced means the last two years of secondary, see my other blog post on Uganda’s education system). I teach at the leadership school. I don’t feel like I understand the education system here in Uganda enough to talk about it freely, but I wanted to say something, so I am summarizing points made by someone else.

            What he said was that university scholarships and admissions are based purely off of one’s scores on national exams. In the U.S. we don’t have national exams in the same way they do. We have the non-required (but basically are if one wants to go to college) SATS or ACTS. These are important for college admissions but not the only thing that is looked at. GPA, extracurriculars, etc. are also important. In Uganda, the national exams are standardized tests that function more like finals – as summations of the classes they are taking – and they are basically the only qualification that university admissions look at.

            Someone else said that this is not exactly true. There are some exceptions where they consider other thing. The government introduced the Quarter System in university admissions. This selects quotas from different regions in Uganda to ensure equal admissions access for different regions and tribes. I think the U.S. equivalent would be race-based scholarships and/or affirmative action, which is not as regionally/geographically-orientated (maybe I am wrong but this seems correct). This it seems is more a reflection of the fact that different groups in the U.S. are primarily not divided into different areas of the United States (maybe into different parts of a city but not different parts of the U.S.). There are also some scholarships given to the physically-disabled and some athletic scholarships. I was told the athletic scholarships are very small, nothing like they are in the U.S. admissions.  

What he said was that the rich are the only ones who can afford to go to good schools. Poorer people are either forced to drop out and work or go to much cheaper government schools. The rich can afford to pay for better quality, private schools. At these schools they are able to learn enough to be able to do well on their exams, something that the usually under-funded public schools can’t provide (discussed in more detail in the previous blog about the Ugandan school system). Thus government scholarships for the universities, which remember are based on national exam scores, are heavily biased towards the rich, private-schooled children. Quite literally the government has a certain number of scholarships it will award and gives them to the best exam scores. No scholarship means no university, which prevents access to many “high class” jobs. This is sort of true in the U.S., except that a significant number of the middle class go to universities without financial aid (very few have all their expenses paid and seem to have them partially paid, with the rest of the cost paid by loans), something that I am unsure anyone, except maybe the very rich, can afford to do here. People who get accepted to universities without scholarships often try to work to pay, but people in this situation usually drop out. (The common age for a college student, based on my observations, that is by asking the college students I met their ages or when people attended universities, is around 26. This is because many have to work for a while first.) This produces a cycle of inequality, as education is strongly correlated with income and university education is becoming increasingly necessary for many jobs. That is the topic of my next paragraph.

            Jobs are few and hard to find, and competition for them is driving the amount of education needed to get them, from secondary, to undergraduate, and now to graduate degrees, an issue in the U.S. as well. This was something I noticed in Kampala: I stayed at my organization’s headquarters where there were many Ugandans in their twenties who were college educated (or finishing their universities) who were looking for jobs and/or being pushed into further studies. One friend in particular reminds me of this. He was in his late twenties or thirty (I can’t remember) and had been in what I call school-work for ten years. He first went to university but found his field no longer open and had to go back, but before he could do that he had to work for a few years. He then had a similar issue with graduate school.

            The next issue he discussed was that educated Ugandans are opposed to doing physical work. They expect to do white collar jobs. One of his goals as a teacher is to help his students have a more realistic attitude about blue collar jobs. This reminds me of the teachers I met in Kamwenge last year, as they expressed the same concern and goal. This expectation of non-physical work among the educated is also present in the U.S., but it seems significantly different here. I don’t know enough to know the details of this attitude here but know enough that is it different and it seems more extreme in intensity. The teacher said that many college-educated people would rather beg on the streets of Kampala than do blue collar jobs. I think one significant difference is that in the U.S., by and large, most jobs actually are white collar. Blue collar jobs have been declining for years, for better or worse (a little bit of an oversimplification I know). The decline or outsourcing of the manufacturing sector to actually make the materials we consume is the best example of that. In Uganda, most jobs are blue collar. The economy is primarily based on agriculture (he supplied the percent of Uganda’s GDP is agriculture, the figure I now forget, but is more than half). It may be apparent that the differences between the two countries reflect other more complicated macro-level forces, that I won’t get into, not only because they are off-topic but because they are far too complicated for me to understand enough to discuss intelligently. But an economy so focused on physical, particularly farming, jobs with rather competitive, white collar employment prospects, and educated groups expecting to get these jobs create tensions.