Action plan a priority for Kuwait education reform

Action plan a priority for Kuwait education reform

KUWAIT: The government established Kuwait University in 1966, distributed over buildings in various residential areas of Kuwait. In the early 1980s, the government decided to build a comprehensive university. But this took about 40 years to complete, with its costs doubling several times and its buildings catching fire on seven different occasions. During that long period, high school graduates compounded and reached 44,600 students in the academic year of 2020/2021 (including adult education graduates) at a compound annual growth rate of 6.2 percent for the last seven years.

To accommodate this large number of students during the long construction period of the public university, besides the Public Authority for Applied Education and Training (PAAET), 15 private higher education institutions were established and operated in addition to five other institutions under construction. The two public institutions still accommodate the most significant number of students (about 77,000 students for the last academic year) or about 66 percent of the total number of higher education students.

Kuwait University, the largest university, comprises 16 colleges in addition to higher studies. Some of these colleges are outstanding. Nevertheless, according to various performance indicators, the KU ranking has descended beyond the first one thousand best universities in the