Efforts to address educational injustice in Iran continue

The bill proposed by the Ministries of Science and Health emphasizes maintaining four groups of student admission quotas. Is it possible to eliminate the remaining controversial quotas?

The head of the Iranian Education and Testing Organization suggested that all other quotas be eliminated, except for regional quotas, veterans, brilliant talents, and quotas that meet the needs of underprivileged regions.

According to Ebrahim Khodayi, these are the four quotas that have been proposed in the “proposed bill.” The bill was prepared by the Ministries of Science and Health, and the government has sent it to the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution for a decision.

Khodayi, who spoke at the meeting of the Council for the Islamization of Universities and Educational Centers, emphasized that in this bill, "an effort has been made to consider issues such as consolidating and optimizing quotas, creating balance and equilibrium in the scientific capacity entering higher education, considering scientific interests and gaining the public trust of society, establishing educational justice, supporting underprivileged regions, creating healthy competition, and such issues."

Based on the proposal of the two aforementioned ministries, local selection in the entrance exam should be eliminated and quotas should be considered "in a special way" based on the needs of the provinces.

The bill also recommends that some quotas, including those for veterans, be considered as excess quotas over the capacity of universities.

Demand for "fundamental change"

Farzad Jahanbin, acting vice president for cultural and student affairs at Islamic Azad University, stated at a meeting of the Council for the Islamization of Universities and Educational Centers: "It seems that many of the related problems will not be solved without a fundamental change in the assessment and admission system. The selection process should be left to the universities, taking into account a specific quorum for the exam."

Saeed Reza Ameli, Secretary of the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution, also called for a review of the current trend, saying that it has been more than thirty years since the war ended and the statistical population of veterans and combatants has decreased.

He stated: "With the reduction in the number of people registering for the aforementioned quotas, the percentage of quota coverage should also be adjusted accordingly."

Abdullah Jasbi, a member of the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution, also called for the elimination of local selection because, in his opinion, with the expansion of government and non-government higher education centers in Iran, "the existential philosophy of local selection at the provincial level has disappeared."

He suggested that, to establish educational justice, "past quotas" be eliminated and "the process of applying quotas should take on a different and, of course, more limited process."

Jasbi also called for "updating and reforming the formulation of the veterans' quota" and for a certain percentage of veterans to be introduced to higher education centers "as surplus capacity for the entrance exam."

A serious problem for Iranian higher education

The debate about quota students is not new, and in recent years it has always peaked for a short time and then subsided.

One of the cases that attracted media attention was the criticism of Hamid Akbari, the Deputy Minister of Health for Education, in August 2019. He strongly criticized the status of admission quotas in medical fields, namely dentistry, refereeing, and medicine.

Source: DW