Aligning Incentives for Reforming Higher Education in Tunisa

This paper is about the institutional and regulatory system governing higher education in Tunisia; its focus is on autonomy and accountability and it also compares the performance of public higher education graduates to the private sector’s. The main idea guiding this paper is that better educational outcomes depend, among other things, on the institutional arrangements and the incentives structure they generate. The paper analyzes the current incentive system underlying the functioning of the university system in Tunisia. In spite of the reforms attempted to improve the quality of the education system this system remains very disconnected from the demand side of the labor market. Management and academic staff have little incentive to adapt their training and research programs to the market needs. This is to a large extent because they enjoy little autonomy and are hardly accountable. The paper also relies on data drawn from the recent Tunisia Higher Education Graduates’ Survey (THEGS 2015) initiated by ERF which builds on similar studies previously undertaken by ERF in Egypt and Jordan. This data is used to compare the outcome of the public universities with the private institutions with a focus on the employment performance of their graduates. Private universities behave differently, and some try to innovate in terms of pedagogy and to be closer to the potential employers’ demands. However, they remain small and attract less than 8 percent of the total student body. They are all profit driven and tend to have few if any permanent academic staff; instead, they rely mostly on temporary teachers. Nevertheless, based on the THEGS 2015 data, they manage to perform quite well compared to their public counterparts.