Having graduated from high school this year, 18-year-old Zeina Abdallah is preparing to start university.
That may seem unremarkable, but it makes her the exception in Tripoli’s Jabal Mohsen neighborhood, a low-income area that just a few years ago was at war with the adjacent area of Bab al-Tabbaneh.
“When we were in the ninth grade, we went different ways,” Abdallah said of her childhood friends, recalling the transition from primary to secondary education. “There were some who left and some who continued with me.”
Out of the 30 students who finished ninth grade in her class, she said, only 10 went on to secondary school the following year. She will also be the first in her family to go to university.
Abdallah lives with her parents in the small house where she grew up, along with her father’s second wife and her four siblings. Her father owns a small minimarket. Her mother dropped out of school after the seventh grade and got married at 17. But she encouraged her daughter to stay in school and not to marry young.
Since Abdallah was in sixth grade, she has dreamed of being a journalist. She said that although she sometimes struggled with the harsh instruction methods of her teachers in the local public school, “it never entered my head to leave school.”
Students like Abdallah who come from communities where higher education is the exception rather than the rule face obstacles both on the path to university and once they arrive on campus. Many of them require extra-support to help them with the transition.
Public school students, who typically come from lower-income families, face particular struggles. Lebanese families that have the means to enroll their children in private school overwhelmingly do so: In the 2018-19 school year, only 30 percent of Lebanese students were enrolled in public school.
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While no statistics have been published on the percentage of public versus private school students who continue on to higher education, a 2016 BLOM Bank report on the education sector noted that private school students had significantly higher pass rates on the brevet and baccalaureate exams than public school students did, with the exception of the sociology and economics concentration, where public school students had a marginally higher pass rate.
In recent years, a number of initiatives have sprung up aiming to bridge the gap for students who might otherwise not continue their education. The programs have been driven in part by the influx of Syrian students to Lebanese public schools and the alarmingly high dropout rates among refugee students - according to a United Nations assessment, in 2018 only 3 percent of upper-secondary-school-age Syrian adolescents in Lebanon were attending school - but they have also targeted vulnerable Lebanese students like Abdallah.
In Abdallah’s case, over the past year and a half she took part in the “Positive Deviance” program, set up by the NGO CARE International in coordination with the Education Ministry. The project targets 15- to 18-year-old girls in northern Lebanon who have “high socio-economic vulnerability” and are enrolled in public secondary schools.
It aims to both encourage the girls to continue their education - providing homework help and information on scholarship opportunities as well as life-skills classes - and get them to mentor others who might otherwise drop out.
“Not all of the parents see the importance of education - [the girls] don’t have role models in their community,” said Wafaa Obeid, a project officer with CARE.
The American University of Beirut launched its own program this year aimed at facilitating the transition from secondary school to university for students who might not pursue higher education.
Through a new program called School to College Transitions Among Vulnerable Youth in Lebanon, a group of 100 11th-grade students from public schools in Beirut - both Lebanese and Syrian - were selected to take part in 20 hours of hands-on on-campus training in various majors, along with 10 hours of counseling that covered subjects such as applying for scholarships, over eight weeks in April and May.
The program will follow the students over the next year as they make decisions about pursuing higher education, and will track their success in applying for universities and scholarships.
“We’re trying to understand, first of all, why do they transition or not transition ... but also trying to in parallel do an intervention to facilitate this transition for some of the students,” said Hana Addam el-Ghali, the director of the education and youth policy program at AUB’s Issam Fares Institute.
Aya Shehab, who finished 11th grade this year at Abdullah al-Alayli public school in Beirut’s Corniche al-Mazraa, was one of the students participating. She joined a group of about 10 students who got an immersion in the nursing specialization. They learned to give CPR, respond to a choking victim and give vaccinations. Now, her sights are set on studying nursing at AUB.
“I didn’t have any idea of going to university before, but now with this program it encouraged me a lot, and now I want to go,” she said.
Many of the factors that push promising students not to pursue higher education are economic. In some cases they may not be aware of the scholarships available, Ghali said. In others, even with a scholarship, young people - particularly men - may feel that they need to go to work instead. In the case of girls, conservative families may be reluctant to let them leave home to go to university. And those who do arrive at university face another set of challenges. One of those, in some cases, is language, as instruction at most Lebanese universities is in English or French.
Shehab, who is still shy in English, is taking online classes in hopes of bringing her level up.
Abdallah is waiting for a final decision on a scholarship that would allow her to enroll at the private Azm University in Tripoli, where the language of instruction is English. (Otherwise, she will attend the public Lebanese University.) But when asked how her English is, she said, with an embarrassed laugh, “zero.”
Students from nontraditional backgrounds may also face troubles in adapting to student life at the university, and even to the style of instruction, which puts more emphasis on critical thinking skills than they are used to, Ghali said.
If the transitions program is successful, she said, she hopes to see it expanded into a national initiative.
“There is a gap that we have in the country in terms of awareness and peer guidance and counseling that needs to be addressed at a national level in public and private schools,” she said.
“We need to start early, we need to work at a national level, we need to bridge that gap, bridge that transition into college.”
This article has been adapted from its original source.
