Higher education at a crossroads in the Arab world
When structural changes are evidently in process, higher education can no longer expect to remain stable. By Dr Habib Fardoun, Principal Consultant, QS Quacquarelli Symonds
Beyond regulatory challenges, I'm keeping watch on the rapid growth in intra-Asian mobility.
My hope for 2026 is less action, not more!
2026 is going to experience a turbulent time in the history of higher education. The industry that offered a sure method of success is now on the border, besieged by gradual demographic change, technological change, change in political priorities and even changing labour demands.
Being a person who has worked with PhD and Master’s students throughout the MENA region, experiencing both the phases of their education, I have witnessed these macro-level pressures at their lowest level of implementation: students becoming sceptical of the worth of their degrees, the faculty being confused about the use of artificial intelligence, and institutions being increasingly challenged to redefine their mission. This essay will present my views on what to watch in 2026, opportunities and concerning signs of decline, and trends that will keep on defining whether higher education will be a stronger institution or a more divisive institution than ever before.
The future of the region in 2026 can be seen as a year of great transformation with the Arab nations increasing their drive towards the objectives of the knowledge economy. The number of enrolments in the Arab world has been increasing, especially in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) where there is a massive investment in Education 4.0 programs that are already paying off.
The most common regional performance indicators that have been widely reported are that universities in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon are becoming more prominent in Arab higher education systems. In North Africa and the Levant, the situation is more complicated, though there is a high demand to access, which is limited by economic pressure. Both the UNESCO Institute for Statistics and the World Bank estimate that tertiary enrolment in the Arab world was at some 16 million students at the beginning of 2026 plus a predicted 3.5 percent growth in the participation in the private sector.
Table 1: Estimated 2025–2026 Enrolment Trends (Arab Region)
Source: Author synthesis based on UNESCO Institute for Statistics data, World Bank education indicators, and regional educational monitoring reports.
There are more disturbing undercurrents to this expansion. The demographic cliff that has long been awaited in the form of traditional college-age demographics is starting to happen. Although the Arab world still enjoys a relative youth bulge, there are early indications of stagnation or even a decrease in the number of university-age youths in such countries as Tunisia or Lebanon, according to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs’ World Population Prospects. Any institution still relying on traditional school-to-degree pipelines will be forced to move towards adult learners, programmes based on credentials and other avenues to education.
Probably, there is no trend that worries me more than changing trends on international mobility. Although the Arab world is progressively establishing itself as a destination centre – evidenced by the launch of long term residency programmes in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, to name a few – outbound mobility to the western world is experiencing increasing cross winds. The increased tuition charges and tough visa policies in the United States and the United Kingdom have added to an overall tendency of regionalisation. According to international reporting based on the Institute of International Education Open Doors data, the number of new international student enrolments in the United States in the 2025/26 academic year has decreased by approximately 17 percent, and the entire report represents a wider set of pressures on Western higher education systems. The trend has prompted a number of Arab students to pursue regional centres or transnational education arrangements that provide globally recognised degrees at their proximity.
The economic consequences are far reaching. To the regional institutions, this is a chance of keeping the talent that would otherwise have been lost to the region. Nevertheless, in the case of the public universities in North Africa and the Levant, the threat of brain drain is still high as the competition between skilled students and faculty increases within the GCC. Whether mechanisms of regional cooperation can help unify the Arab higher education market more will the real test in 2026.
The results of recent graduates in the labour-market are troublingly dichotomous. The early 2026 regional labour statistics indicate that, although the level of graduate unemployment is relatively low in various GCC states, comparable to about 3.7 percent in Saudi Arabia and 2 percent in Kuwait, unemployment among graduates is a severe problem in other countries, with projections in Jordan and Libya as high as 18 percent. One of the biggest regional issues is underemployment, which is due to the continued mismatch between the old curriculum and the digitalisation of the corporate world.
Table 2: Arab World Graduate Employment Indicators (2025–2026)
Sources: International Labour Organization; Arab Monetary Fund; regional labour-market surveys (2025/26).
What bothers me most is the fact that 82 percent of the surveyed Arab youth responded that they felt unprepared to enter the workplace due to the lack of guidance and a sense of not knowing what skills are valued most. The college-to-career pipeline starts to grow more and more fractured, and the institutional responses to these changes have lagged behind.
In 2026, the use of artificial intelligence will still transform higher education. According to independent international evaluations, the Middle East is above the global level in the adoption of AI in the workplace, with the highest rates of engagement recorded in the UAE, where it is estimated that 64 percent of working-age citizens use AI tools. There is still an AI gap within universities. When students are increasingly relying on solutions like Gemini Pro, which is freely accessible to eligible university students in Egypt in 2025, it is only about 19 percent of the institutions of higher learning worldwide that is known to have implemented formal AI policies.
The student-preparedness gap between the student and the institution is both an opportunity and a threat. The Gulf countries are making huge investments on Arabic-focused AI models to make digital learning spaces culturally and linguistically relevant. Those institutions that do not pursue active involvement in these developments are at risk of becoming less and less relevant to a generation that perceives AI as a partner and not a threat.
In the midst of these challenges, however, there are also grounds of optimistic pessimism. Mental-health programs operating at the regional level that involve over 50,000 students point to the fact that the stigma about psychological assistance is slowly fading, especially in Qatar and the UAE, despite the high rates of anxiety and depression among young people, estimated 35-38 percent. Concurrently, short term credential programmes are on the rise. The enrolment in vocational education in the Arab world increased by around 6.6 percent in late 2025 and workforce-based credentials in technical colleges in the regions propelled by an estimated 28 percent, which is indicative of greater acceptance to labour-market demand.
As a professional who deals with students every day to help them cope with the challenges of graduate education and research, I regard 2026 as a reckoning year. When structural changes are evidently in process, higher education can no longer expect to remain stable. An increasing percentage of the Arab populace views higher education as an expensive and closely disassociated experience with the labour-market reality.
The successful institutions of 2026 and thereafter will be those that are flexible: which means, developing alternative credentials, incorporating AI with purpose, reinforcing career preparation, and responding to affordability in more substantive ways. To students, the message is the same that a degree is valuable, but it is just one component of a larger array of skills, experience and adaptability. Education is in turmoil. The question is whether it will rise stronger or weaker depending on the decisiveness of the response of institutions and policymakers in this crossroads. I have not lost hope, but the clock is ticking.