Youth and Education in the Middle East: Shaping Identity and Politics in Jordan

Author: Daniele Cantini

Book review by:  Tariq Tell and Jocelyn DeJong

Published by: London, I.B. Tauris

Year of publication: 2016

ISBN: 978-1-78-453247-5

Fueled by petrodollar subsidies and remittance income, as well as by the human and financial capital brought by inflows of refugees from Palestine, Iraq, and now Syria, higher education in Jordan has experienced remarkable rates of growth. Whereas at independence in 1946 the country boasted only one secondary school and a few dozen university graduates educated in Baghdad, Beirut, Damascus, and Cairo, by the late 1970s university enrollment rates compared favorably with those of wealthy countries in the West. Successive cohorts of university graduates from the neighboring Arab states, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Eastern as well as Western Europe, and the United States laid the foundations for a burgeoning and remarkably cosmopolitan intelligentsia.
The growth in the numbers of graduates continued even after the Jordanian economy stagnated in the mid-1980s and the devaluation of the Jordanian dinar in 1988 raised the cost of studying abroad.

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Youth and Education in the Middle East: Shaping Identity and Politics in Jordan