The Foreign Service Journal, April 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2016 41 business management, public health, nursing, agriculture, education, information technology, science, English and journalism. The degree programs would need to be four to five years to accommodate remedial needs. I don’t foresee the schools offering graduate programs because the pressing need is for education at the level of state universities and community colleges in the United States—in other words, the fundamentals of undergraduate education. But perhaps top graduates could be given scholarships to pur- sue further education in America. Graduates of the American universities will enter the job market with skills in the top 2 to 3 percent of local university graduates and are likely to be sought after. Rigorous protocols will be required to ensure that accep- tance to these schools is merit-based. State Department or USAID oversight of the universities’ operation will be neces- sary to stand up to pressure from wealthy families to admit their children, qualified or not. Students would be expected to pay tuition that is consistent with the host government’s loan programs for university students, which might cover 10 percent of the university’s budget. Rigorous background checking of student applicants will also be necessary, as fraudulent docu- mentation is rampant. Online and distance education systems such as massive open online courses (MOOCs) and real-time online classes taught by U.S.-based faculty will go a long way to reduce costs. Perhaps most of the teaching could be done this way for courses that are not laboratory- or field-based, with support and examinations carried out by resident U.S. staff. The neces- sary fiber-optic Internet backbones have already been laid in much of Africa. A Timely Proposal Now is the time to invest in this initiative, ideally through reallocating current aid flows. The universities would need to be subsidized to give ample opportunity to applicants of aver- age African income. Online and distance education systems will go a long way to reduce costs.