INEQUITABLE ACCESS TO HIGHER EDUCATION IN AZERBAIJAN

An analysis of the higher education system in Azerbaijan offers clear indications of an impending social and economic challenge due to the inequitable access to higher education between urban and rural populations. A substantial part of the disparity in access to higher education in Azerbaijan stems from the large gap in the quality of education between regions as well as types of secondary schools. A comparison of university admission rates among the different groups in question is usually taken as a fairly good proxy for most aspects of equity in access to higher education. Such analysis of cross-sectional data for Azerbaijan reveals a huge disparity in higher education admission rates between urban and rural areas.

BACKGROUND: The higher education system in Azerbaijan has not seen the kind and extent of transformation in terms of governance, finance or organizational structure in higher educational institutions (HEI) that has occurred in most other formerly socialist countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The government’s first major education reform initiative since the collapse of the USSR came after the Education Reform Program of 1999, but its focus was mainly on the quality and relevance of general education. Higher education, however, has seen little meaningful change during the two decades of independence. The rapid increase in higher education participation rates, the expansion of the private higher education sector and the establishment of new public HEIs observed in most transition countries, such as Poland and Georgia, as well as in neighboring Turkey, has not occurred in Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan’s higher education market remains supply-driven and the country has one of the lowest tertiary gross enrollment rates (about 16 percent) in the region. The gross enrollment rate in the tertiary education sector in 2008 was even lower than the 1990 “pre-independence” levels, and considerably lower than most countries, including Russia (77 percent) Kyrgyzstan (52 percent), Moldova (40 percent) and Tajikistan (20 percent).

Continued governmental price control over tuition policies in public schools and strict student admission quotas imposed on both public and private universities, large state subsidies provided to public universities, as well as the high rate of value added tax imposed on private higher education institutions are all contributing factors to the current market failure in the higher education sector. The long list of the government’s regulatory functions in the higher education system has seen little change in the past 20 years, which is quite indicative of the general perception that the government is disinclined to loosen its control over universities or deregulate the higher education market in the near future. Azerbaijan also lacks a comprehensive and proactive policy analysis to feed the decision-making process in areas critical to the efficient functioning of the education sector. This is a major setback which undermines the Government’s capability to fully comprehend and tackle challenges and effectively prioritize reform initiatives in the higher education sector, and has also obscured challenges in areas such as equity from the higher education community.

IMPLICATIONS: Azerbaijan’s Constitution and its Law on Education set forth principles that guarantee a universal right to education and prohibit discrimination on the basis of age, gender, race or ethnicity in accessing higher education. However, the equality of rights alone, devoid of proper measures to ensure an equitable distribution of opportunities and choices across various groups, does not always lead to socially desirable outcomes. Education is a prime example of inequality in the distribution of public goods. Azerbaijan has experienced growing inequality in the educational outcomes at the secondary level in the past decade, which has in turn diminished the system’s capacity to ensure equitable access to higher education across the country. A considerable part of the existing regional disparities in the transition to higher education in Azerbaijan is attributable to an unequal distribution of educational choices and opportunities among urban and rural areas. Specifically, research shows that cross-regional data are consistent with the hypothesis that the higher education system in Azerbaijan is significantly predisposed to students from urban areas and affluent families, and that current educational policy and regulations exacerbate inequitable access for the disadvantaged.

In 2009 the university admission rate among newly graduated secondary school applicants varied from 42 percent in the capital Baku and 39 percent in the city of Sumgait to about 16-19 percent in the rural districts of Aghsu, Khachmaz, Imishli, Sabirabad, Tartar and Saatli. Furthermore, the data show that graduates of several dozen public high schools called lyceums concentrated primarily in Baku, as well as private Turkish schools, have consistently outperformed graduates from the rest of the country in university admission exams over the past decade. The mentioned schools have a very high (sometimes close to 100 percent) rate of transition to higher education institutions. On the opposite side of the spectrum there are hundreds of high schools, mostly in rural and remote areas, that consistently see zero or close to zero transition to higher education among their graduates. For instance, in the 2009 university admission exams 850 out of 3,143 participating schools from around the country had zero graduates proceed to higher education, mainly because they scored low in university admission exams. By comparison, 18 out of 29 schools in the Agsu district and 12 out of 20 schools in the Dashkasan district, both of which are rural areas, were among the zero transition schools in 2009, while none of the 310 schools in capital Baku or the 49 schools in Sumgait, and only 2 out of 31 schools in the district of Absheron (the outskirts of Baku) fell into that category. This combination of stark imbalances between regions and schools in transition rates, particularly regarding the problem of zero transition to higher education, is persistent over time and shows no signs of improvement. The regional imbalance in the distribution of failed schools is a warning about the widening performance gap at the secondary level which in turn leads to inequitable access to higher education between urban and rural areas.

The analysis of student performance in the university admission examination shows that access to higher education is greatly obstructed by the relatively poor quality of education in rural secondary schools, which leads to lower high school graduation rates and lower transition rate to higher education. But socioeconomic factors, namely the costs and availability of private tutoring and costs of higher education (both tuition fees and living costs in cities where almost 82 percent of all HEIs are located) may also have had a strong restrictive effect for students from rural areas to access higher education. The current state tuition assistance scheme is based solely on the student admission examination scores and does not envisage need-based financial support with the exception of students from refugee and IDP families; nor are there any tuition deferment programs or student loans to alleviate the socioeconomic barriers for disadvantaged students.

CONCLUSIONS: The higher education system in Azerbaijan is rarely evaluated on the metric of equity, but the described imbalances in higher education participation rates among urban and rural areas should be sufficient to draw the attention of the educational community in Azerbaijan to the need for more policy-oriented research, as well as informed and evidence-based policy-making in critical areas such as equity. The long-term social and financial effects of the sustained inequity in Azerbaijan’s higher education sector can be very costly, because this condition limits intergenerational mobility for the population from rural areas and poor households and contributes to the poverty trap. The current situation is also likely to generate higher future social protection costs for the state in connection with the relatively lower level of educational achievement and incomes of the population in rural areas. Therefore, any steps that will be taken in reforming higher education must also focus on improving the mentioned challenges in secondary education, as well as transforming the current state tuition assistance program into an effective need-based tuition assistance scheme. Otherwise, reforms in higher education run the risk of benefiting predominantly the students from urban and wealthy households, and worsening the existing gap in access to higher education between urban and rural areas.

AUTHOR’S BIO: Rashad Aliyev is an Edmund Muskie Fellow in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.